The heart follows the head

IT was one year ago this weekend that ZZ blew his top, 12 months and what seems like forever since Zinedine Zidane kicked a ball in anger for the last time and then, in even angrier mode, butted Marco Materazzi to floor the Italian giant and, with him, French hopes of winning the 2006 World Cup.

And even though your correspondent was in Berlin’s Olympiastadion that night, I still can’t quite — if you’ll pardon the expression — get my head around what happened.

More to the point, to judge by his most recent comments, neither can Zidane.

Rarely in sport has the line between triumph and disgrace been so starkly defined. The narrative leading up to the final had demanded the most romantic possible ending. An aging France, written off as contenders even as the tournament was getting under way, gradually and irresistibly rediscovered their mojo, with Zidane — having come out of international retirement to help the cause — the central, talismanic figure in the victories over Spain, Brazil and Portugal which swept Les Bleus to the final stage. And Zidane’s final stage too. The greatest player of his generation — indeed, a footballer this observer would number in his all-time top five, up there in the pantheon with Pele, Maradona, Cruyff and Best — had let the world know that this would definitely be his last bow as a professional footballer. And so the world watched and waited united — Italy apart, of course — in a desire to see Zizou finish with a winning flourish, to get rare and blessed confirmation that, even in the real world, there are stories which can end happily ever after.

And right up to ten minutes from the end of extra-time things seemed to be heading that way.

Long before then, Zidane had already applied his signature to another masterpiece in the making, with a seventh minute penalty so audacious in its execution that it left people’s jaws flat on the ground alongside helpless Italian ‘keeper Gianluigi Buffon. Later Patrick Vieira would remark: “If we’d won 1-0 with Zidane scoring from the penalty the way he did, can you imagine the reaction? Zidane for President!”

It wasn’t to be. Materazzi levelled for Italy but by the time the game reached extra time, there was only one side trying to win it, Zidane himself coming closest to doing just that with a bullet header which Buffon did brilliantly to keep out. And then, with just those ten minutes remaining, Zidane delivered another version of a bullet header, the one that would shock the world, define the night, disfigure his career and ensure that Italy would survive to win the World Cup on penalties.

In common with my colleagues in the press box, the thousands in the stadium and the millions watching on tv, I didn’t see the incident as it happened. Nor did referee Horacio Elizondo until it was brought to his attention by the fourth official who, despite FIFA briefings to the contrary, probably only saw it at the same time as the rest of us, when the pictures suddenly flashed up on a tv monitor.

The instant you saw them, however, you knew the game was up for Zidane. If we’d been anticipating romance, what the footage actually showed — a calculated and ferocious head-butt to the upper chest of Materazzi — was a plot twist so shocking, violent and unpredictable that it seemed to have gate-crashed the sporting drama from an episode of The Sopranos on another station.

Materazzi had gotten whacked alright. But so had Zidane — the whacker whacked, you might say — and with him went France’s World Cup dream. Understandably, the night holds different memories for Italians but, for many of us, everything else seemed incidental. Such was the chaos in the press box that one colleague was about to press ‘send’ on his hastily rewritten World Cup report when it suddenly struck him that he’d neglected to mention that Italy had actually won the damn thing.

It would take much longer for some context to emerge. After all kinds of wild speculation about what Materazzi might have said or done to provoke such a self-destructive reaction from Zidane, the Italian finally explained: “I was tugging his shirt. He said to me: ‘If you want my shirt so much I’ll give it to you afterwards. I answered that I’d prefer his sister. It’s not a particularly nice thing to say, I recognise that. But loads of players say worse things.”

And then he added the coup de grace: “I didn’t even know he had a sister before this happened.”

Zidane has always declined to offer his own detailed version of what took place, perhaps because the Materazzi version is close enough to the truth and the Frenchman knows that his response was an explosion of anger out of all proportion to the provocation. (And not without precedent either, as 14 red cards and previous form in loafing and stamping attest).

In his media and advertising duties since retiring, there have even been signs that he can make himself the butt of a joke, even if it’s a lame one. For the Generali Insurance Group, Zidane’s picture featured on billboards with the slogan: “How do I choose Generali? With my head!”.

Aye, but is his heart in it? The latest edition of the magazine ‘Four Four Two’ reports that Zidane recently gave an interview to the French TV channel Canal Plus in which he hinted at how different things might have been.

“If I hadn’t already announced my retirement I would have played on for another year,” he confessed. “I had wanted to. But I had made the announcement and there was no going back.”

It’s impossible not to think of Roy Keane and how, even if his Irish comeback didn’t end in success — though it did include an encounter with Zidane at Lansdowne Road — it at least gave him the chance to replace Saipan as the final entry in his international record.

For Zidane, however, the headbutt will forever remain the final full stop of his football career.

“I didn’t choose for it to be this way,” he said. “It happened and I can’t pretend it wasn’t me.

“I’m a human being. I reacted. I apologised to everyone and I would have liked things to have ended differently. What’s tough is that I have to live with it for the rest of my life.”

And yet this may not be the last we see of Zidane on a football pitch. ‘Four Four Two’ also reports that there’s a 12-year-old at Real Madrid who is already captivating on-lookers with a range of extravagant moves, including a famous and familiar one they call ‘the roulette’.

His first name is Enzo — after the great Uruguayan forward Enzo Francescoli who played for Marseille in the 1980s. His second name, as if you haven’t already guessed, is Zidane.

“No one can deny that little Enzo is his father’s son,” wrote the Spanish sports paper Marco. “The genes are there for everyone to see.”

And Enzo himself has revealed: “We play a lot at home and my dad has thought me a few tricks.”

Let’s just hope the son can keep his you-know-what.