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slablizard
Jul 13, 2006, 4:19 PM
Post #203 of 203
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Registered: Oct 13, 2003
Posts: 5558
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Nice one : "HE INSULTED his mum. His poor old mum"
The fear that made Yosser Zidane fall for Ploys from the Black Stuff
By Martin Samuel, Sports Writer of the Year
HE INSULTED his mum. His poor old mum. Mama Zidane, eyes moist with tears of pride watching her son in a World Cup final. She’s not well, you know. And then this Italian, this toerag, slanders her in the vilest way imaginable. Well, of course, he flipped. Wouldn’t you?
No, actually, you wouldn’t. Not if this was your last game and you had a World Cup to win. Not if the team had been built around your presence and was looking to you above all others. Not with a penalty shoot-out looming. Not with damn near 20 years’ professional experience to call upon, during which time no insult would have been considered too grave to be hurled in your direction. Not with your country depending on you. The most remarkable aspect of Zinédine Zidane’s ignominious farewell to football is the number of people queueing up to exonerate him. The Eyeties had a pop at his old mummy. Cor blimey, guv. Stands to reason, dunnit?
In 1989, a few months after winning the title, Arsenal flew to Miami to play in what was laughably billed the unofficial world club championship, mostly by journalists angling for a good story and a week in Florida. The trip had been set up by a friend of George Graham and involved a match against Independiente, the champions of Argentina. Because neither club were king of their continent, the world domination aspect of the fixture was somewhat elusive, as was the crowd at the Joe Robbie Stadium, but the match more than made up for it, an ill-mannered tear-up, occasionally punctuated by episodes of high-tempo, high-quality football.Gus Caesar, the Arsenal defender, was banished to the stands, as was Gary Lewin, the physiotherapist, a decision that contravened all Fifa guidelines on player safety.
It was better than the official Club World Championship that year, a dull affair between AC Milan and Atlético Nacional, of Colombia, ended by a single goal after 118 minutes but concluded in understandable acrimony. Back at the hotel, the late — and, at that time, great — Arsenal winger, David Rocastle, said that the Independiente defenders knew only one English word: nigger. He thought they had learnt it especially for him.
Rocastle had a stormer that night, as Zidane will have done on many occasions when opponents attempted to disturb his focus with crude abuse. Can you imagine what a Muslim of Algerian descent from the poorest quarter of Marseilles has had to put up with throughout a career spent largely in Italy and Spain? Can you imagine what a Muslim in Madrid has dealt with since March 11, 2004? Even in France, the multiracial nature of the team drew the attention of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right National Front leader. “The coach went overboard on the proportion of players of colour,” he said. Le Pen came second to President Jacques Chirac in the 2002 election. Viewed in this context, there is nothing Marco Materazzi could have said that Zidane would not have heard, in some form, before. He is not always the coolest character, as 14 career sendings-off would indicate, but it must be said that the majority have been for rash tackles or retaliation to physical provocation, not verbal. To professionals, the trash talk is part of the game. What might earn a looping right-hander in the pub is traditionally met with acceptance or, at worst, sneering contempt on the pitch.
A recent Premiership fixture brought together two former England colleagues: one striker, one defender. The forward had a good chance and missed. “I can remember when you used to score those,” his opponent mocked. “Yeah,” came the reply, “and your bird’s getting f***ed all over England.”
To the man in the street this is a different language, a different mentality. The sudden escalation from harmless ribbing to grotesque verbal violence is found in no other sober environment. And football is not alone; all sports flirt with chicanery in the quest for an edge, not least cricket, in which the Australians have turned sledging into an art form. We do not have to like it, but we would be fools not to acknowledge it and to acknowledge also that, in reacting to what Materazzi said or did, Zidane broke one of sport’s golden rules: he put his feelings ahead of what was best for his team.
There was no potential positive for France in their best player butting an opponent. His country could only suffer if he was found out and if he was not, who won but Zidane? The downside of his action, we know: it may even have cost France the World Cup, considering Zidane was a certain penalty-taker. And while French football owes Zidane too much for his team-mates to be hard on him, there is not a player alive who does not understand that he let his country down.
In big matches, particularly, players are conditioned to expect anything — the worst provocation, the sneakiest tricks off the ball. A television close-up on Sunday showed France defenders hacking at the ankles of their counterparts who stood in front of the wall as Andrea Pirlo prepared to take a free kick. “If they spit in your face, you walk away,” Terry Venables would tell his England players.
“This is too important to put yourself first.”
Not all conversation during a match stretches the boundaries of taste. There are still some good one-liners. “Walt Disney couldn’t draw your face,” John Kay, of Wimbledon, said to Liverpool’s nasally challenged defender, Phil Thompson. The Australia fast bowler, Merv Hughes, was a legendary chirper. “Does your husband play cricket as well?” he asked Robin Smith, the England batsman. The same story has Hughes later marching down the wicket to tell Smith: “You can’t f***ing bat.” The next ball, Smith struck him to the boundary. “Hey, Merv,” he shouted. “We make a good pair — I can’t f***ing bat and you can’t f***ing bowl.”
The most memorable exchange at the crease concerns Eddo Brandes, the Zimbabwe tailender, and Glenn McGrath, the Australia fast bowler. “Hey, Brandes, why are you so fat?” McGrath asked. “Because every time I f*** your wife she gives me a biscuit,” Brandes replied. Even the Australia slip fielders laughed, yet, some years later, when Ramnaresh Sarwan, the West Indies batsman, met a scandalous comment about Brian Lara with a taunt about McGrath’s wife, the bowler went berserk. Jane McGrath had recently had cancer diagnosed and was no longer fair game.
It may be that Malika Zidane fell into the same category. Reports in France say that she was taken ill on the day of the match and admitted to hospital. While Materazzi was not to know, in the circumstances, her son would have been hugely sensitive and an offensive remark that would have been shrugged off on another day might have carried greater resonance.
Yet Materazzi denies any reference to Zidane’s mother and there is no proof, beyond the contradictory evidence of lip-readers. (And if you think football is coming out of the World Cup final badly, then the speech-reading profession is in utter disarray. The various translations doing the rounds contest that Materazzi insulted Zidane’s mother, sister, wife and family, plus the late coach Jean Varraud, of AS Cannes, and the Muslim religion, covering issues as wide-ranging as terrorism, prostitution, incest and sexual preference. An ugly death to all and sundry may also have been part of the deal. If true, this really was a tour de force of verbal confrontation, the vehemence of which would turn Jerry Sadowitz green, considering Materazzi only had two sentences to go at it. Alternatively, these are high times in the world of lip-reading, lads, so good luck and don’t spend it all at once.) There could be a simpler explanation, involving the decoding, not of mouth movements, but the game. Zidane was not at his best in the Olympic Stadium. He scored from the penalty spot — just — but France did not deserve the lead and soon Materazzi took it away. Pirlo was the game’s best creative player by some distance, Fabio Cannavaro its best defender and the close attention of Italy’s excellent back four and defensive midfield kept the shackles on Zidane in a way Brazil never could.
After a brief France flurry early in the second half, the final settled into a familiar pattern and France did not look as if they would score until Zidane’s header was denied by Gianluigi Buffon after 104 minutes. By the time Zidane and Materazzi came together five minutes later, perhaps Zidane feared that hope of a happy ending was fading. It might not have been what was said but the situation that provoked his anger, effective trash talk, like good comedy, being all in the timing.
The most profound head-butt previously delivered on British television came from a character called Yosser Hughes in Alan Bleasdale’s play The Black Stuff. Sacked for moonlighting, his tools fallen from the back of his lorry as the result of a high-speed chase, Hughes returns to find two chancers loading his equipment into their van. Mad with rage, he seeks any excuse to vent his fury. “Say something,” he orders them. Silence.
“Say something,” he repeats. One man begins a hesitant explanation. “That’ll do,” he says. Bang.
Perhaps Zidane was in a similar place on Sunday night and in the end his anger, his indulgence, were not about what was said but what he could not bear to hear said. The best player was Italian, the best team was Italy and the cup would be heading back to Rome. The perfect adieu to the greatest footballer Europe has produced was about to slip through his fingers. No wonder he felt like putting the nut on someone.
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