Uefa Reports
Zidane is more than a surname. Since the 109th minute of the 2006 FIFA World Cup final, when Zizou had his nipple tweaked by Marco Materazzi and reacted to a still unspecified insult by heading the Italian defender forcefully, gracefully, in the chest, the word ‘Zidane’ now describes a genre of sporting crime. It was an utterly unprecedented way for such a career to end, although the Sunday Times showed a prescience Nostradamus would have been proud of. Profiling Zizou in their match preview, the paper noted: “The grace of a dancer, the smile of St Teresa, the grimace of a serial killer, Zidane’s last match is a date with destiny, inviting a surprise ending which the gods of football may be unable to resist.”
‘Hard words’
The butt is still a riddle, the mystery deepened by the conflicting explanations from the participants, other players, journalists and a host of lip readers as to what Materazzi actually said. In a FIFA hearing, both participants admitted the Italian’s trash talk had been nasty but not racist. Zidane spoke of “very hard words” about his mother and sister. But the Italian, who had lost his own mother as a boy, partly denied this, saying “Mothers are sacred” and admitting only to name-calling the sister. Gideon Rachman, in Prospect magazine, suggested Zidane’s rage was really directed at himself. “The game had been incredibly tight, with few chances, when he worked an opening and a clear header at goal. He struck it beautifully but straight at the goalkeeper. He had seen the winning goal flash before his eyes. For what seemed like minutes, Zidane stood frozen in anguish. That was two minutes before the head butt.”
‘Super-Achilles’
Many psychologists have defended Zidane, saying he didn’t have time, in the seconds between insult and attack, to rationally calm himself down. But he had composed himself by the time the Argentinian referee Horacio Elizondo came over to send him off. Rachman’s solution to the ‘Mais pourquoi?’ question was original because it was primarily about football. The plethora of explanations that followed were political (a protest against racism), socio-psychological (his discomfort with his role as a national icon in France), and even mythological (Zidane was a tragic hero who, like Oedipus, erred not because he was evil but because he was frail). Bernard-Henri Levy in the Wall Street Journal called Zidane a “super-Achilles” and insisted the player was more widely admired than the Pope, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela. He concluded: “Perhaps it is not so easy to stay in the skin of an icon, demigod, hero, legend.”
Exploitation
The world would not let it lie. Mattel, the owners of Scrabble, had prepared a newspaper ad with the letter Z – which is worth ten points, the same as the number on Zidane’s shirt – and the slogan: “Now you can play with your head”. Instead of withdrawing the ad, Mattel changed the suddenly ironic motto to “There will always be only one”. The day after the final, a French record company executive Sebastien Lipszyc and his friends wrote a song called Coup de Boule (Headbutt) in half an hour as a joke. Within weeks it was No1 in France. By the autumn of 2006, it had become clear that the butt had, if anything, strengthened Zizou’s appeal. “From an advertising point of view, Zidane’s emotional charge is twice as big after the World Cup as before,” said Frederic Raillard, who used the player in a TV ad for Orange.
Rehabilitation
If Zidane had been English, as his Real Madrid CF team-mate David Beckham could have told him, his effigy would have been set on fire. But France had begun to forgive him almost as soon as he trudged off the pitch. The very next day, president Jacques Chirac, while regretting the incident, told Zidane: “You are a virtuoso, a genius of football and an exceptional human being. That is why France admires you.” Redemption started in earnest with the release of the fine documentary Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait, which reminded the world he was a truly great player. The portrait did, though, close with Zidane being sent off after a scuffle on the touchline. He was, as one reviewer noted, sent off more often in his career than Vinnie Jones or Roy Keane. Charity work has helped burnish Zizou’s image. Judging by the crowd of young fans that surrounded him when he gave a skills clinic on the day of the 2007 Champions League final in Athens, his name has lost none of its charisma.
Superb volley
Zidane is too great a footballer to be remembered purely for one astonishing loss of control. His superb volley in the 2002 UEFA Champions League final against Bayer 04 Leverkusen, one of the best in the tournament’s history, is a much more fitting epitaph. But Zidane’s two World Cup finals are defined by an awful symmetry. He won the 1998 final against Brazil with two headers and lost the 2006 final with two headers: one that nodded the ball straight at the Italian keeper and another, two minutes later, that struck Materazzi’s chest.