World in Motion (eBook)

INTRODUCTION

THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW. IT IS THE EVE OF THE 2018 WORLD CUP finals draw and it is hard to imagine a more alluring location as I leave behind St. Basil’s Cathedral and approach the red-brick, fifteenth-century Spasskaya Tower. For the world’s press, this tower, built into the huge wall that marks the western edge of Red Square, is the route into the Kremlin, the traditional heart of Russian power. I pass the guard at the foot of the giant gate and step through into the snow-laden interior.

English-language signs for ‘Media Centre’ lead past a line of gold-domed churches and cathedrals and on to the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses: a place built for Communist Party gatherings but tomorrow the setting for Gary Lineker, the main draw presenter, and his support cast of fellow World Cup greats to pick the balls and chart the way ahead for the 32 teams at Russia 2018.

Another global showpiece awaits, with all its joys and controversies, but this is not the reason I am here. Instead, as I stand in the media zone waiting for Fabio Cannavaro, Italy’s 2006 World Cup-winning captain and one of Lineker’s draw assistants, my thoughts are on a tournament receding into an ever distant past.

Italia ’90 is further away today than the 1966 World Cup, England’s moment of glory, was in 1990. For any English football fan over the age of 35, though, the mere mention of Paul Gascoigne’s tears and Luciano Pavarotti’s ‘Nessun Dorma’ and the national team’s thrill-ride to the semi-finals can still make the soul smile.

As a journalist, I have covered World Cups on four different continents, from Japan to Brazil via Germany and South Africa, but none prompts the same stirrings of nostalgia as that 1990 tournament – seen, in my case, through seventeen-year-old eyes in the lounge of the family home in Liverpool.

When Fabio Cannavaro stops to speak to me, it becomes clear that Italia ’90 cast its spell on him too. He was certainly closer to the action as a sixteen-year-old ball boy inside the Stadio San Paolo in Naples on the night Argentina broke the hopes and hearts of the hosts in a semi-final just as dramatic as the one between England and West Germany.

‘Of course I cried,’ he remembers, flashing his Colgate smile. ‘I was a child with a lot of passion.’

The purpose of this book is to examine the impact of Italia ’90 across the globe and Cannavaro is one name on a long list of more than a hundred people I spoke to who witnessed at first hand the power and emotion of that World Cup 28 years ago.

It was a tournament which took place at a pivotal moment in the sport’s evolution; the advent of the Premier League and Champions League was around the corner, the influence of television was growing, and the world of football was about to become a much smaller place. In a sense, it acted as both a last hurrah and a searchlight on the future. It had a direct impact on the way the game would be packaged and played in the decades to follow.

To gauge fully this impact, I travelled to eleven countries over a period of ten months, an itinerary which included Cameroon, whose footballers emerged as the darlings of the tournament.

‘The victory of a whole continent’ is how the Cameroon Tribune described their victory over Argentina in the opening match – the first for any sub-Saharan African nation at a World Cup and the cue for a groundbreaking run to the quarter-finals. FIFA responded by guaranteeing greater representation thenceforth for the countries of CAF, the African confederation. ‘Their demand is justified,’ declared Franz Beckenbauer, West Germany’s coach. ‘The Africans have caught up.’

To emphasise the excitement that must have shaken Cameroon, this was the first time its twelve million people – the population in 1990 – had been able to follow their team’s World Cup matches live on television.

They were not alone in taking a big step forward. Tournament newcomers Costa Rica and the Republic of Ireland both progressed to the knockout rounds. It was a World Cup of consequence too for the United States, restored to the world’s elite after a forty-year absence, and the United Arab Emirates, who gained a deeper understanding of the sport’s soft power.

As for Europe’s Eastern Bloc nations, competing in Italy as seismic changes unfolded with the Iron Curtain’s collapse, it was a moment for a generation of footballers when old realities crumbled and new doors opened – and some of the personal testimonies gathered, on journeys to Russia, Czech Republic, Slovakia and the Balkans, evoke a lingering bittersweetness.

It was a World Cup with more novelties than most: Fair Play flags, statistics on our TV screens (RAI, the host broadcaster, offered a table at the end of each half listing shots on goal, saves, corners, fouls and offsides), and England’s first-ever penalty shootout. It also heralded significant changes to the Laws of the Game – a point underlined to me in an illuminating interview in Zurich with Sepp Blatter, the former FIFA president.

One of my most memorable encounters was with Totò Schillaci, Italy’s bolt-from-the-blue centre-forward who won the Golden Boot for his six goals at his home World Cup – yet scored only one other international goal in his entire career. Schillaci, a Sicilian then more at ease speaking in his regional dialect than Italian, explained one autumn afternoon in Palermo his struggles to cope with the attention his feats attracted, and it is difficult to imagine a World Cup footballer today, with their cottage-industry entourages, suffering in this way. (Oliver Bierhoff, the Germany team manager, today uses the term ‘independent entrepreneur’ for his players.)

Similarly, Roger Milla’s story has a thick slice of romance that would be virtually impossible to find reproduced in 2018. It is a story he recounted to me at his home in Yaoundé, the Cameroonian capital, remembering how he stepped out of semi-retirement on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion to lead defences a merry dance with the Indomitable Lions.

Another highlight was lunch at a restaurant in Argentina named Italia ’90, and owned by Sergio Goycochea, the man who began the World Cup as the Albiceleste reserve goalkeeper and ended it as hero of two penalty shootouts.

It is these human stories, combined with the transformative background events, which make Italia ’90 so compelling. It is a tournament whose participants, I learned, inspired a Costa Rican film and a Czech play. Irish writer Roddy Doyle set his novel The Van against the backdrop of World Cup mania in Dublin, where half a million people turned out to welcome back Jack Charlton’s team. (Such was the hold of the tournament on Ireland that the Limerick Leader, seeking the advice of a local pharmacist, ran a front-page article afterwards headlined ‘World Cup fever could lead to withdrawal symptoms’.)

In England, there was An Evening with Gary Lineker, the play by Arthur Smith and Chris England centred on a group of friends sat around watching England’s semi-final match. Smith tells me, ‘It was a more insulated world then. There wasn’t football on the telly all the time, so any individual game that was on had a greater impact and you’d all gather and watch it together.’

A World Cup then came with a Christmas-morning tingle. Four whole years had passed since Mexico ’86 and the last month of wall-to-wall football on television.

In the words of journalist Adrian Tempany, writing in And the Sun Shines Now, his outstanding book on the Hillsborough disaster and football’s development thereafter, ‘… its magic belonged to another age, one of scarcity and rarity.’

In my research, I heard a resonant line from ITV commentator John Helm, who, early in the Cameroon-Romania group-stage match in Bari, told his viewers: ‘Cameroon today [are] playing in green shirts, red shorts and yellow stockings. It’s not often we see anything like that in England.’

He was right. The World Cup was an explosion of colour into our living rooms. In the 1989/90 season, not a single European club competition match was broadcast live on the BBC or ITV – not even the European Cup final. To the football watcher born after 1990, after the arrival of football’s satellite age, the rarity factor cannot be overstated.

During the English season leading up to Italia ’90, there were twelve domestic top-flight matches broadcast live, compared with 168 in 2017/18. Moreover, the armchair viewer had to wait until 29 October 1989 and the meeting of Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur, fully ten weeks into the season, for the first live match.

Arsenal and Liverpool had produced the most gripping finish to any league season the previous May with the north London side’s last-gasp, title-grabbing 2-0 victory at Anfield. It was a match broadcast live by ITV on a Friday night but it had evidently not altered the thinking of the rights holder, who considered that people were more likely to stay at home and watch football once the clocks had gone back and the longer nights had set in.

For its part, the BBC screened eight FA Cup ties live that season – including, for the first time, both semi-finals on the same day. With the Liverpool-Crystal Palace and Manchester United-Oldham Athletic matches...