World
Beaters
Brazil won soccer's greatest prize in a not-so-great
finale
by Alexander
Wolff
Issue date: July 25,
1994
The XV World Cup had much to recommend it: full stadiums,
courteous crowds, several unforgettable games and a
reversal in the trends toward fewer goals and rougher play
that had blighted recent editions of soccer's great event.
In fact the 1994 Cup
turned out so well that few people wanted to see it end, and
Sunday's final looked as if it never would, not after 90
scoreless minutes of regulation time or an extra 30 of
goal-free
overtime.
(Simon Bruty)
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That's when this World Cup, which had busied itself with
MAKING SOCCER HISTORY (as the slogan writ large at every
venue phrased it), made soccer history in a way it could
have done without. Brazil and Italy settled what was
supposed to have been an
epochal meeting with penalty kicks. Never before had a World Cup
final been decided in such capricious fashion. Never again
should it
be.
Oh, the most deserving country won; Brazil was the team the
other 23 nations chased for a month, and none could beat.
And, to be fair, a penalty-kick shoot-out can provide stark
moments of drama. But Pelé himself once pronounced what
should be the
penalty kick's epitaph: ''It is a cowardly way to score.''
Imagine listening to Lincoln and Douglas debate for two
hours and then having them step down from their podiums to
decide a winner on
belches.
It was all the more a shame because, at long last, the Rose
Bowl hosted a sports event that actually meant something.
The final was a summit meeting of two nations, one each
from soccer's two great continents, who had outsized
traditions of and passions
for the game. Each finalist had won three Cups before
Sunday; one would seize an unprecedented
fourth.
For a number of months both nations behaved as if this
World Cup business were actually very simple: Whichever
country's press and fans more thoroughly humiliated,
castigated, second-guessed and otherwise dissed their
national coach would win. From
afar, Arrigo Sacchi of Italy and his Brazilian counterpart,
Carlos Alberto Parreira, must have regarded each other with
some admiration and lots of sympathy. Despite skimpy
playing credentials, each ascended to the position of
national coach by working hard
and paying dues. Both have a worldliness that allows them to
see beyond soccer, and to escape from it: Sacchi reads
literary fiction and takes solitary bike rides; Parreira
paints
seascapes.
Most important, each had introduced to his respective
soccer culture the shock of the new. Sacchi had cast aside
the style prevailing in Italy for years, one that
emphasized defense and the quick counterattack. In its
place he installed an all-field,
attacking game requiring extraordinary conditioning and
discipline. ''We are an egotistical people,'' he liked to
say, justifying his search for 22 selfless troopers—a
search that led to his trying out 73 different candidates
for the national team. Last
spring an Italian sports magazine ran photos of them all, with
mug shots of the Pope, Sylvester Stallone as Rambo and
Robin Williams as Popeye mixed in, under the headline:
ARRIGO, HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN
ANYONE?
For his part, Parreira stood charged with suppressing the
ginga, the flair for which Brazilian soccer is known and
loved around the world. Many citizens—from Pelé to
President Itamar Franco to Parreira's mother—had an ideal
lineup kicking around his or
her head and no compunctions about sharing it with the
world. ''Maybe Brazil should be allowed to play with six
teams,'' Parreira said before the Cup. ''We might please
half the people. One team should be attacking. One should
play defensive, another
creative, one could be a fantasy team . . . but to please
everybody with just one, it can't be done. If I listened to
all these suggestions, I'd go
mad.''
Through Parreira's three years in charge of Brazil's team,
he never wavered in his belief that the freewheeling style
of Pelé's day didn't stand a chance against modern
man-to-man defenses. ''Parreira is the first coach to put
his own stamp on the
team,'' says Francisco Marcos, the team's liaison and translator
during the World Cup. ''Some Brazilian players are happy
for that. And some are resentful, because it has detracted
from their ability to show their
flair.''
And so, despite having been pilloried in their respective
countries for making their teams look too much like each
other's, here they nonetheless were, Sacchi and Parreira,
Italy and Brazil, in the final. And one of these dilettante
apostates was going
to be acclaimed a visionary Renaissance man. One of them was
going to guide a team to a world
championship.
The Brazilians sometimes play as if the goal is a frame,
and they're trying to create the prettiest possible canvas
to mount inside it. In their semifinal against Sweden on
July 13, the Magnificent Mononyms got off 26 shots, nine of
them good chances,
but couldn't quite sign their name to anything. Not until 10
minutes remained did they score the game's lone goal, and
then they did so in the least likely way imaginable—when
the 5 ft. 6 in. Romario leaped at a cross from Jorginho
and, as Sweden's taller
defenders looked on helplessly, one-hopped the ball past
goalkeeper Thomas Ravelli with a nod of the head. This was
rather like a fast-breaking outfit winning an NBA playoff
game with a dunk in traffic from its point guard. But it
bore out a Brazilian
proverb that assistant coach Mario Zagalo likes to cite:
Dripping water on a hard rock eventually leaves a
hole.
For its part, Italy won its place in the final with a large
dose of luck. Twice in the tournament, the Azzurri survived
the ejection of a player to win while a man down. Only
minutes from virtual elimination in the first round, the
Italians came back to
beat Norway and stay alive. In the second round they beat
Nigeria with seconds to spare. They won their quarterfinal
by getting a game winner from their star, Roberto Baggio,
just moments after Spain's Julio Salinas missed on a
breakaway. Even Italy's
semifinal date with Bulgaria owed itself to buona fortuna,
for the Italians figured to meet defending champion
Germany—until it was upset by Bulgaria. Only in its 2-1
defeat of Bulgaria did Italy score an outright, luck-free
win, as Baggio struck twice in
a five- minute stretch during which the Azzurri played as
well as any team in the
Cup.
When Italy and Brazil went at each other for a couple of
hours on Sunday, the two teams were like prizefighters in a
clinch. The only thing that could have pleased soccer
aficionados is that they locked each other up with their
respective skills, and
not by incessant fouling, as Germany and Argentina had in the
final four years ago. When the last of the 120 minutes
ticked off, the teams exited the field for their
five-minute break before the shoot-out to a chorus of boos
and whistles. After the break,
the two goalies, Brazil's Cláudio Taffarel and Italy's
Gianluca Pagliuca, walked together, arms over each other's
shoulders, to the goal where each would step off his paces.
''We told each other that the winner was going to be the
team that was
predestined to win,'' Taffarel would
say.
To begin the shoot-out, Sacchi called on Franco Baresi, a
34-year-old defender who had undergone arthroscopic knee
surgery barely three weeks ago and who on Sunday had
started in the backfield. Baresi soldiered bravely through
the game, but he opened
the shoot-out by lifting his kick high over the
bar.
But Pagliuca got Baresi off the hook by snuffing out the
first Brazilian penalty kick, by Marcio Santos. And after
the next four shooters matched each other, Italy's Daniele
Massaro stepped up to face Taffarel. ''He hasn't been
tested, and I hope he
won't be,'' Parreira had said of his goalkeeper a few days
before the final. ''But I'm confident that in the moment we
need him, he'll say, 'Hello, I'm here.'
''
Taffarel moved off his mark early, guessed right and with a
half step greeted Massaro's kick in front of the goal line
with a game-turning , ''howdy.'' When Dunga converted
Brazil's fourth attempt, Italy had only a slim hope left:
Surely Baggio would
make his kick; perhaps Brazil's Bebeto would miss
his.
When Baggio was first given his uniform for this Cup, he
was handed number 17. But 17 was the number Roberto
Donadoni wore when he failed to convert a critical penalty
kick against Argentina in the semifinals of the 1990 World
Cup. Though Baggio was
hastily refitted with number 10, on Sunday that number couldn't
save him. Baggio had been a questionable starter up until
game time because of a sore right hamstring, and he would
later describe a sharp pain that coursed through his leg as
he struck the
ball. The ball wound up where Baresi's had moments
earlier—far over the
bar.
The abject failure of one man touched off such unfettered
joy in 22 others that the scene begged the question again:
Could this really be just? In a shoot-out the coach usually
designates his two most stouthearted players to kick first
and last—leadoff
and anchor, as it were—and that's where Baresi and Baggio
fell in Sacchi's lineup. They had been among Italy's two
most heroic players on the afternoon, playing hurt but
playing hard. It wasn't fair somehow for players who turned
in such superb
performances to have had their good work undone so
precipitously.
''We have to accept the rules with great calmness and
serenity,'' Sacchi said afterward when asked his opinion of
the shoot-out. Others need not be so obliged, so in all
probability a Cup final will never again come down to a
moment with all the
grandeur of a training drill. Well before the 1998 World Cup in
France, a task force appointed by FIFA, the governing body
that stages the World Cup, is expected to review a number
of tiebreaker proposals currently in the pipeline. Some are
oafish, such as the
idea of giving the victory to the team with the most corner
kicks. Others are simply impractical for an event as huge
as the World Cup, such as replaying the entire game several
days later, as is done when England's FA Cup Final ends in
a tie. Some
people who like the shoot-out want the rule makers to put more
life in it: Have the shooter approach the goalkeeper on the
dribble, and let the keeper come out to challenge him. Then
it might at least look like
soccer.
But the most intriguing proposal involves taking the final
match—and the final match only—into sudden death after
120 minutes. The two teams would simply keep playing until
someone scored. The players would be hangdog tired, sure,
but in a final there
would be no need to save anything for another day. And isn't
it silly for a soccer team to carry 22 men when the rules
make it all but impossible to use more than 14 in one game?
For every, say, 15 minutes of extra time, a team would be
permitted another
substitution. If the World Cup final really is a crucible
for heroes, let the players show off their heroism. Let
them take up a shield in a war of
attrition.
FIFA officials are cool to most of these proposed reforms,
especially the last one. ''You can't drive a team
indefinitely onwards,'' says FIFA media assistant Andreas
Herren. ''This is the seventh match, in the fourth week.
These guys are literally
going to pass out on the field.'' Adds Guido Tognoni, FIFA's
press officer, ''It's very hard for the referee in sudden
death ((to make the tough penalty calls)). And a champion
really has to be decided in a defined amount of
time.''
Both Herren and Tognoni are Swiss, and the Swiss tend to be
finicky about time. And perhaps they have a point. Perhaps
open-ended, sudden-death overtime is physically
unreasonable. Yet surely it's psychological torture to go
through shoot-outs as
they're set up now. And it's an aesthetic disaster to have the Cup
riding on a few set pieces at complete odds with the grand,
flowing pageant preceding them. On Sunday only the grace of
circumstance allowed the right team to win, for the wrong
reasons.
Parreira was 15 when Brazil won its first World Cup, in
1958. In a triumphant final in Stockholm, the Brazilians
beat the host Swedes in such captivating fashion that the
Swedish crowd cheered the visiting team feverishly as it
took a victory lap. There
was no live TV broadcast back to Brazil then. ''I had to
wait a month to see the goals in the movie theater,''
Parreira
recalls.
Alas, he will wait the rest of his life to see the goals
from the great final against Italy, the game in which
Brazil won its tetra. He'll wait that long because there
weren't
any.
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