Misc

End of Zidane’s world

PEOPLE SAY THAT THE ENGLISH ARE obsessed with the idea of greatness. Thats not such a bad thing to be obsessed with, in my view. Put the very, very good here and the great there and ponder. What divides them? Why do we withhold greatness from one and bestow it so willingly on another?

When it comes to football, at least, I think I have the answer. Scan a player for possible greatness and ask: does he score goals? Good. Does he make goals? Good again. But now for the question that actually matters: does he make teams? Has he created a great international team in his own image, by the brilliance of his play and the force of his mind?

If the answer is yes, then we are in very rare company the rarest of the rare. Pele, obviously, Franz Beckenbauer, Diego Maradona. Me, Id throw Johan Cruyff in there. I know he hasnt got a World Cup on his CV, but he should have. But thats the level at which we are arguing.

On, then, to Zinedine Zidane. And no argument, none whatsoever. A great footballer. If anyone has been in any doubt about that, this last hurrah at his last World Cup, in which every game he plays might be his last, has destroyed it, reminding us of all the ways in which his greatness was expressed. As ever, his presence on the pitch makes the team as a whole better and also makes every individual on his own play better.

The more shame that his last action on the pitch was to walk off it in response to a red card. It was given for a headbutt that uncharacteristically for something that Zidane intended actually missed its target. Thus a great actor also missed his own exit: and it is a warning to us all not to make gods of footballers, or of any other form of human. But Zidane still left us something worth remembering: a slide-rule pass. The cliche is long out of fashion, but I have always liked the way it combines the idea of immense precision with the actual action of a person using a slide rule. And the slide-rule pass was always Zidanes greatest contribution to the movement of a football match.

He was the great geometrician, a master of angles with an uncanny ability to match the weight of his pass to the speed of the receiver. This is a hard enough thing to calculate in figures, even with the help of a slide rule. But that calculation was Zidanes forte; at lightning speed and often with a pirouette, the ball coming free at some unexpected moment, at an unexpected angle, splitting open the opposition defence as if it were an oyster shell.

Many of Zidanes moves would have looked flash if performed by anyone else. But they were never performed for themselves, always in the context of the search for victory. Zidane was a player with an immense sense of style, but style was always remorselessly subjugated to content. He never played the virtuoso for the sake of it, it was a temptation he was immune to.

Always severe and serious, but with that strange sense of detachment. It was as if he were well aware of the absurdity of football and, for that matter, of life. All the same, he could still see no point in giving these absurdities anything less than his best. He played with a wonderfully Gallic sense of cool, as if he had a Gitanes in his mouth even as he turned, swivelled and passed.

But it was not what he did that was the key to his greatness, it was what he was. It was his presence that made the fin de si�cle France team the greatest in the world, one of the greatest ever. You cant win the World Cup without a proper striker, they said. You can if youve got Zidane in your team, with his conductors baton and his slide rule and his falconine profile and his Gitanes ablaze. And just to prove that it was no fluke, he led the France team to victory in the European Championship two years later.

The defining picture of that triumph of 1998 was the hands holding aloft that monumentally ugly trophy, hands of every shade of colour that human pigment can come up with. It was a victory for a nation unified by un sang impur.

And at the heart of it, Zidane, with his North African blood and his hooked bill of a nose and an almost ecclesiastical air about him, with his widows peak of stubble and his tonsure.

Martin Johnson, the England rugby union captain in the World Cup triumph of 2003, said that he never set himself up to be a leader. It was just that people tended to follow him, demonstrating that the true gift of leadership is the ability to inspire followship in everyone else. That was always something that Zidane was able to do. Zidane was what David Beckham aspired to be and fell short of. No shame for Beckham there. Both reached for the stars; Zidane got there, Beckham didnt. Alas, poor David, Zidane really was the best footballer in the world. Zidane really did function as the inspiration of a great team. Zidane really did win the World Cup. Draw a line between Beckham and Zidane, then. On the one side, very, very good; on the other, indisputably great.

See, its easy to tell the difference when you know how, isnt it?