Look Out, World: ZZ Still Tops
Think of it as a warning shot fired across the bows. That’s certainly how the other 31 World Cup teams viewed it.
The shot in question was unleashed May 15 at Hampden Park in Glasgow, Scotland. It flew off the raised and outstretched foot of Zinedine Zidane and crashed into the back of the Bayer Leverkusen net to earn Real Madrid its ninth European Champions Cup.
More important, from Zidane’s standpoint, was the fact that with one mighty swing of his left leg he had repaid the $64.9 million that the Spanish club had spent on acquiring him from Juventus only 10 months earlier and, at the same time, added a coveted Champions Cup winner’s medal to his own glittering collection.
Reaction to the goal--seen worldwide because it came in a showcase game, a European Cup final--was instantaneous, and nowhere was the excitement greater than at France’s World Cup training camp in Clairefontaine, south of Paris.
“It was magic,” midfielder Christophe Dugarry said. “His movement was magnificent, the precision of the shot incredible.”
Rob Hughes, perhaps the most perceptive of commentators on the world’s game, described it perfectly in the next day’s International Herald Tribune:
“If there was any doubt that Zinedine Zidane, the son of an Algerian janitor, has grown into one of a handful of men throughout history who can turn soccer into art, he dispelled it [with that goal],” Hughes wrote.
Zidane argued that he had “simply slammed at the ball without thinking,” saying that it was “pure instinct.” If so, it is a feral instinct, the same kind he showed four years ago at the Stade de France outside Paris, where his two headed goals in the 1998 World Cup final sent Brazil spinning to a 3-0 defeat.
Hughes, again, on the marvelous May 15 goal:
“In the split seconds that it takes for three opponents ... to lose a yard of positioning, Zidane had anticipated every option. Just inside the penalty box, 18 yards from the net, he balanced his weight expertly on his right foot, with which he has scored many of his great goals, and almost from behind his own body hooked the left foot toward the flight of the ball.
“He struck it on the volley, almost a meter off the ground. He hooked it with such beautiful timing, such brutal power, that Joerg Butt, the Leverkusen goalkeeper, did not have a prayer of a chance of intercepting it.”
The same thought must have crossed the minds of all 31 goalkeepers who could come face to face with Zidane at the World Cup, and especially those of Uruguay and Denmark, who will see him in the first round (Zidane will sit out the opener Friday against Senegal because of a thigh injury).
The scary thing about Zidane is that, at 29 and having won just about everything there is to win, he still is hungry for more. “Zizou,” as the two-time world player of the year is nicknamed, earns $12 million a year as the world’s highest-paid player and has hardly taken it easy since 1998.
First came the European Championship in 2000, where he again was head and shoulders above every other player, moving Pele to remark, “Zidane is even better now than two years ago.”
Then came the FIFA Confederations Cup in 2001, where France again prevailed. And now, just this month, the European Champions Cup, a trophy that had twice slipped from his grasp while he was playing for Juventus.
“I have my best footballing years ahead of me,” he warned in an interview with Agence France-Presse. “Maybe not five years, but I hope at least another two or three years at the highest level.”
But there is another side to the man from Marseille, or, to be more precise, that Mediterranean port city’s largely immigrant district of La Castellane. For one thing, he is a husband and father.
He and his Spanish wife, Veronica, have three sons, the first named Enzo in honor of Zidane’s own soccer hero, Enzo Francescoli of Uruguay. His youngest son was born only last week. Then there is Zidane the off-field leader, the Legion of Honor winner and United Nations goodwill ambassador, the quiet man who speaks up when he believes it is necessary.
Such a moment came during the recent French presidential election, when Zidane, along with many other French World Cup players, called on voters to reject National Front candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen because, in Zidane’s words, his party “has nothing in common with the values of France.”
That brought a snarl from Le Pen, who said, “Zidane is nothing special.... I would say to him as well, ‘I will give you part of my votes if you give me a proportion of your wages.’”
Le Pen was crushed in the election.
France’s World Cup foes are anticipating the same fate.
