France and Argentina poised to contest 22nd World Cup final
Stage set for Messi v Mbappe but unlikely hero could emerge
FIFA+ recalls standout individual feats in football's greatest fixture
The 22nd FIFA World Cup™ final on Sunday provides a platform for two groups of players to enshrine their names in football folklore.
France and Argentina are both targeting third World Cup triumphs, while the contest provides an intriguing sub-plot in the battle for global supremacy between Golden Boot contenders Kylian Mbappe and Lionel Messi.
The outcome of the 64th match of this gripping, unpredictable tournament is impossible to call. The only certainty is that events in Lusail Stadium will create heroes for life.
FIFA+ looks at the mix of established Galacticos and less heralded performers who stole the show on the biggest stage of all.
Not a final in the conventional sense, but the closing, decisive game of the 1950 tournament featured enough intrigue, drama, elation and desolation to sustain any number of straight shootouts for the title.
Brazil needed only draw with Uruguay in front of nigh-on 174,000 wedged into Rio de Janeiro’s Maracana Stadium to win a first World Cup. For their fellow South Americans, it was win or bust, with only victory enough to leapfrog the hosts at the top of a four-team final group.
All was serene for Brazil when they led 1-0 after 66 minutes. But Juan Alberto Schiaffino, set up by Alcides Ghiggia, equalised, providing the springboard for wiry winger Ghiggia to shoot past goalkeeper Moacir Barbosa and draw the air from the lungs of the formerly clamorous locals.
Ghiggia duly acquired footballing immortality in his homeland. Did Brazil ever forgive him? Emphatically so. In 2009, Ghiggia was invited back to the scene of his ‘crime’ to plant his compact footprints alongside those of Pele, Eusebio and Franz Beckenbauer on the Maracana’s walk of fame.
Pele had a substantial say in two successful World Cup finals for Brazil. He was at his imperious best when Mario Zagallo’s team summoned a consummate performance to put Italy to the sword in sweltering Mexico City in 1970.
But 12 years earlier in Sweden, the coltish forward was merely 17 years old and initially plagued by a knee problem. Restored to health and undisturbed by the responsibility of trying to deliver a first World Cup to his country, Pele plundered a hat-trick in a 5-2 semi-final victory over France.
Expressive Brazil dismantled the hosts by the same scoreline in the final, with the first of Pele’s two goals – when he urgently lifted the ball over a fast-closing defender before intercepting its return to earth with a volley into the net – among the finest scored in any World Cup.
Geoff Hurst was the archetypal right man in the right place when the serially prolific Jimmy Greaves was hurt in England’s final group match against France.
The replacement striker scored the only goal of a quarter-final clash with Argentina to retain his starting position – controversially, given the popular Greaves’s goals record – for the last-four win over Portugal and Wembley final against West Germany.
Hurst equalised in normal time against the Germans and would have enjoyed enormous acclaim, regardless, if England had clung to the lead following Martin Peters' goal. West Germany struck late, however, prompting manager Alf Ramsey to send his players out for extra-time with the message, "You’ve won it once, now you’ll have to go out there and win it again".
Hurst scored twice more to answer Ramsey’s call and become the first – and still only – man to net a World Cup final hat-trick.
Another host country World Cup triumph secured by an arch goalscorer. The remarkable Gerd Muller plundered a staggering 10 goals at Mexico 1970 – there were 95 in the entire tournament – but despite his double in a see-saw semi-final West Germany were defeated 4-3 by Italy.
No chance of Muller indulging the romantics’ choice of Total Football Netherlands four years later, then. The Dutch led early in Munich but Paul Breitner equalised from the spot and Muller struck decisively two minutes before half-time to gain a position among German football royalty.
The striker scored ‘only’ four goals in the tournament and remembered 1970 as a “far better experience”. Asked by FIFA for his favourite World Cup memory, however, Muller was unequivocal. “Winning the World Cup, of course,” he said. “The day before, I read in a newspaper a clairvoyant said Holland would win. I lost a lot of sleep that night, thinking about it and hoping it wouldn't come true. When we won 2-1, it was just the most wonderful feeling.”
The defining image of a scorching Spanish summer was provided by Marco Tardelli, the midfielder roaring into the balmy Bernabeu night after sweeping home Italy’s second goal against West Germany.
Paolo Rossi claimed the Golden Shoe and delivered one of the great individual World Cup displays when his hat-trick downed Brazil in the second group phase. But it is the uninhibited, screaming, arm-shaking celebration of Tardelli that captures the enormity of striking in a World Cup final.
Born in Marseille to Algerian parents, Zinedine Zidane was one of the totems of the multiracial France team that united a formerly fractured nation 24 years ago. Zidane later admitted he feared home-country pressure, married to a paucity of confidence in Aime Jacquet’s squad, would prevent France from winning their first World Cup.
The combustible midfielder was sent off in the second group game after losing his cool following a challenge from Saudi Arabia midfielder Fuad Amin. Zizou consequently missed two matches but returned for a quarter-final against Italy in characteristically majestic touch.
By the time of the final, the graceful Zidane was untouchable and his two headed first-half goals are arguably the most important scored in French football history.
The ultimate redemption tale. Events prior to the 1998 final, when Ronaldo’s participation was the subject of fevered will-he-won’t-he speculation, remained shrouded in mystery. The Ronaldo who eventually played in Paris was a spectre of the destructive figure recognised as one of the world’s pre-eminent centre-forwards.
Four years later though, he handsomely lived up to his redoubtable reputation, scoring both goals in Brazil’s victory over Germany in Japan – and increasing his tally for the tournament to eight to run away with the Golden Shoe. Form is temporary, goes the saying, class is permanent. Ronaldo’s class will forever be acknowledged in large part due to his exploits in Yokohama two decades ago.
As one-third of Barcelona’s exceptional midfield for all seasons, Andres Iniesta compiled an honours list as long as your arm. That Camp Nou trio was the fulcrum of Spain’s 2010 World Cup success, too. Think of Xavi Hernandez and Sergio Busquets, however, and it is perhaps their feats in club colours that most readily come to mind.
Hear Iniesta’s name and you are naturally transported to Johannesburg 12 years ago and the dreamy control and arrowing shot deep into stoppage time that defeated the Netherlands and won Spain’s first World Cup.
Evidence, if any were needed, that deeds accomplished in a World Cup final tend to eclipse everything else.
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