Sunday, Jul. 09, 2006

Italy's Cup

By MICHAEL ELLIOTT

In Roman times, the ancients would gather at the Circus Maximus to cheer on their favorite charioteers. The old open-air arena is put to other uses now. On the night of the World Cup final, three giant TV screens were set up to show the game, being played in Berlin's Olympic Stadium, to some 200,000 fans. After a long heat wave, Rome had been cooled by a light shower just before kickoff. The supporters arrived with foghorns, whistles, megaphones, squirt guns; they were dressed as Roman soldiers or — more commonly — in the famous blue shirt of their beloved Azzurri.

They cheered, they yelled, they shouted — but more than two hours after the game started, they fell silent, as each of five Italian players and five French ones started their run-up to the penalty spot, united in a final act of drama, settling the World Cup by a shoot-out after the two teams had played to a 1-1 tie. Every penalty but one was struck perfectly. But the shot by France's David Trézéguet hit the bar, and bounced down just short of the goal line. A few minutes later, Fabio Grosso, one of the unsung heroes of the Italian team, stroked his shot to the left of French goalkeeper Fabien Barthez. Italy — who lost to Brazil on the only other occasion that the final went to penalties, in 1994 — had won the Cup for the fourth time.

The game had been dramatic almost from the first minute, when French star Thierry Henry was knocked to the ground and appeared concussed. Henry recovered, and six minutes later, France's captain and inspiration, Zinédine Zidane, playing in his last game of top-flight football, scored from the penalty spot. That success was soon annulled when Italian defender Marco Materrazzi rose majestically to meet a corner and place an unstoppable header wide of Barthez. The destinies of the two goal scorers would be reunited later, in the second half of extra time, when they tangled on the edge of the Italian penalty area. Materrazzi said something to Zidane, and — as has happened before in his magnificent career — a red mist descended on the most famous son of the Marseilles housing projects. Zidane turned, advanced on Materrazzi and butted him in the chest. France's captain was sent off. "What was going on in Zinédine Zidane's head to let something like that happen," said the TV commentator on the French channel TF-1. "Why? Why? Why?"

In time, we may know. Whatever it was, Zidane's moment of madness — and a host of other touches of controversy and brilliance — will ensure that the 2006 FIFA World Cup finals will long live in the memory. A sparkling first round, in which sublime football was played by Argentina and the Netherlands, gave way to a cautious knockout phase, illuminated by a quite stunning semifinal, something like chess played at warp speed, between the hosts Germany and Italy. Yet though the Cup this year may have had some new touches — the officials had radio communications, the ball (its patches colored gold for the final) was a new design and moved strangely in the air — there was, in the end, something traditional about the way that everything played out.

A ticket for the World Cup final may have become one of the most sought-after pieces of paper in the world, corporate sponsors may line up to buy a piece of what is by now indubitably the pre-eminent sporting event in the world, and crowds may cram everywhere from bars in Beijing to stores in Africa to watch the games. But the home of football is Western Europe, which is where its most talented players — wherever they hail from — make a living, and where the fans, drawing on a century of tradition and communal identification, are the most devout and the most knowledgeable. As football solidifies its place as the true global game, the one set of skills that people from Soweto to Seoul can recognize and admire, it was somehow fitting that the two teams who contested the 2006 final should have come not from Asia, Africa or the Americas, but from neighbors to the host nation.

And what hosts the Germans were. "From the very start," said Franz Beckenbauer, peerless footballer in his time, and now head of the German organizing committee, "there were no disruptive factors. Everything just fell into place." But anyone who has tried to put on anything bigger than a church fête knows that faultless execution of complex tasks doesn't happen by chance. That Germany should have handled the logistics of the Cup magnificently was, perhaps, not surprising for a nation which is a byword for efficiency. That it should have done so with such grace and good humor was less to be expected. If Italy has taken the World Cup home, history may yet conclude that the true winners of World Cup 2006 were the Germans, who showed their best side to more than 3 million visitors to their country during the monthlong tournament, and who found a way of celebrating a pride in Germany devoid of the hard-edged nationalism of yesteryear.

Italy, too, needed the Cup — and success in it — to give itself a lift. Drifting politically, concerned that the country's economy is less able than most in the developed world to meet the challenges of the rising Asian powers, Italians, all spring and summer, had to cope with a drumbeat of reports that football, the national pastime and pride, was mired in scandal. As the players waited to hear if some of their employers — four of the top teams in Italy — would be relegated from Serie A, the premier Italian league, it was remarkable how they bonded into a team that, in the end, won it all. Perhaps, in a perverse way, the investigations helped. "Without that scandal we would not have won this World Cup," said Gennaro Gattuso, the bearded, tireless dynamo at the heart of the Italian midfield, after the game. "It gave us an extra motivation to come together. We just kept going forward, without realizing what we were really accomplishing."

The Italians could so easily have lost it. After dominating the first half of the final, they retreated into that old Italian shell that this magnificent team had seemed to have lost for good. In extra time, France had two wonderful opportunities to win the game, once when Zidane, with the last significant moment of his great career, powered a header that Italian goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon tipped over the bar. The French, who won the Cup in 1998, with a team whose core had its last hurrah in Berlin, had to settle for second best this time. "They were pretty well-matched teams," said Olivia, a designer who watched the game in a bar in Paris' Marais district. "They both fought hard."

In Rome, that same sentiment found plenty of takers. "Both teams played equally well," said Filippo Mascioli, in the Circus Maximus. "Either could have won. The fair thing would have been to give both of them a trophy." Sadly or not, life, and football, are not that fair. The World Cup is Italy's. Forza Azzurri!