Diego, time zones and Libya.

Mexico 1986 exists like a step outside my memory between the wonders of Brazil in 1982 and the opening Pavarotti credits of 1990.

Four years older but I can still tell you more about what happened in Spain then in Mexico. I'll blame the newly discovered phenomenon of time zones. Mexico? Who sent the World Cup there. Oh yes, probably the same people who originally picked Colombia who sent out a "phone a friend" after they realized they didn't quite have the money.  Maybe the most honest (non) world cup organizers ever, Colombia. Ironic, somewhat?

So there we were, six hours ahead of what's happening in Mexico. I took a nap before England played Morocco at midnight. I was now a devoted England fan, and had to be well rested. When people ask me if I enjoyed a movie, I very often say I don't remember watching it so it must have been bad. That's my gauge. It was a terrible match, as anti-Brazil '82 as one could get, so boring that I can barely even remember how bad it was. . There was one lesson from this disastrous reason to be going to bed at 2am. Bryan Robson had a dodgy shoulder, dislocated they said. It was to be a recurring thing, Robson and his shoulder that kept popping out. The first of many major injuries I heard about, soon to be followed by ACL's and metartarsals.


Uruguay were the fascinating team of 1986. They were the small South American team who had won the whole thing twice before. That's all I knew, 2-time World Cup champions. What I didn't know was that it was in 1930, when they pretty much invited, and paid for, the European teams to come to Uruguay, and the Europeans were very gracious visitors. The second was 1950 when they inflicted a defeat of enormous proportions on the hosts Brazil in the final that wasn't really a final. And they hadn't done much since then. But when it came to the fantasy world cup organized by a teacher at school, I picked Uruguay to get to the semi-finals, because they were, as I told everybody, 2-time winners. It didn't quite turn out as I hoped. They got walloped 6-1 by Denmark and managed to get a player sent off against Scotland before the referee had barely taken the whistle out of his mouth after kick off.  But after terrorizing the poor Scots into not beating them, and with a point against West Germany, they made into the second round with 2 points. Two points! They were one of the best third placed teams. Fifa had allowed 24 teams at this World Cup and this was their new system to deal with the unusual tournament number of participants. Many years later they solved the problem, by extending it to 32 teams. But that was it for my heroes from Uruguay after that. There was no triumphant march beyond the second round.

England had another middle of the night match and they came through the must win match against Poland thanks to a new hat-trick hero, Gary Lineker.  This time I couldn't muster another night of torture. But I slept happily after waking up to the sounds of distant car horns driving through the streets. This was Malta, where celebrating an English or Italian win was probably done as fervently as in England or Italy. England marched on and suddenly looked unstoppable after beating Paraguay 3-0 in the second round. Paraguay were another exotic sounding team, and South American, so England muts be world beaters by now, I thought.

Then Diego Maradona happened. The proverbial ugly and good side of the Argentinian who was supposed to have been the star of 1982 but took another 4 years to own a world cup, came out. The fight for the high ball bouncing between him and Peter Shilton is quite amusing. Probably the two littlest guys on the pitch, up they went together. If you could have slowed the moment down and been able to analyse rationally what should have happened next, you would have thought: the goalkeeper can use his hands so surely he has that added height advantage of his outstretched hands. Now if you forget the rational analysis, and thought like Maradona, you would have understood that Maradona, despite not being a goalkeeper, also has hands that can reach out. He could physically use them, only the small matter of the rules should have stopped him. And, hey, why not try and hope that you're being watched by a Tunisian referee who's never seen this before. If you eyes witness something for the first time, the brain may not register it's abnormality. And so it was that the Hand of God was born, some of certain belief may say re-incarnated.

Our little Diego was a man with a conscience, though. A few minutes later, with his guilt still burning away inside him, he decided to show the world what he can do what his feet. The English players obliged by forgetting they could tackle him and as he slalomed through the whole English team and scored the second goal, he managed to score the two most talked about goals in world cup history.

Strangely, I was at home with one of my brothers watching this historic moment. It was odd because, I remember World Cups as the time that the whole family gathered around the tv. My mother may have feigned interest for the good of the family. But as she did for many years to come she still knew every player and all their stories. She came back from a trip to England in 1986 and asked what the latest was on Karl Heniz Rummenige's back injury. She sat with us and watched, when she probably would have been happier with a bit of Frank Spencer. This was Malta, so there wasn't much on, but it might have all been more enjoyable than another night with the (in)famous Italian commentator, Bruno Pizzul. And my other 4 siblings, and my Dad? Where were they? It was left to the two of us to rue the injustice that had befallen the poor English again.

Maradona went on to toy with Belgium in the semi-final. The other semi-final was a re-match of the 1982 classic. This time, there was no unpunished Harold Schumacher attack on a French player and the West Germans went on to a clinical win against the French, who had become the Dutch of the eighties. They had the players, the skill, the admiration of the world, but no World Cup. They were part of, along with Brazil, what I believe to be one of the greatest World Cup matches. The quarter final, decided on penalties, stands out as an amazing memory of clean attacking football, a cut above the rest of the tournament. It was the whole of Brazil '82 in 120 minutes.

Mexico '86 also brought a new personal worry: end of year school exams that had to be studied for. And the last minute cramming had to be compacted ever more to be finished by the time the matches started in the evenings. I must have been working slowly on the night of the France-West Germany semi-final as I only caught fleeting glimpses of it.

A couple of amazing things about growing up in Malta were flat roofs and the heat in June. Our roof was my Platini free kick training ground, and my new study area. It was a large roof with an area over the extension to the main building where my Dad had constructed what I remember as an outdoor classroom; tables and chairs with no walls, covered by a corrugated tin roof. This is where I spent many hours after school in June, trying to conjugate my French and Italian verbs while I looked across my adjoining football "field" and wondering what Platini was doing on the tv.

Argentina won what must be the best final of my World Cup life. Jorge Burruchaga scored the winning goal after an exquisite (and I use that word with it's true full meaning) pass from Maradona. West Germany had come back from 2-0 down, to think they had at least earned extra time. But it was not to be as, again, Maradona decided a statement needed to be made. Four years later these two teams played the final again, and it was sadly not quite the same.

The summer of '86 was also supposed to be the year of a family holiday in Tunisia. This is what my Dad had told us. But I'm not sure if this was before or after he also told us that we couldn't go because Ronald Reagan had sent his air force to drop bombs on Libya. It was a little too close, but where we really supposed to go, I don't know. The Libyans fired a missile in our general direction. It landed off the island of Lampedusa, which on looking at a map was not as close as I thought. But for a few weeks, bombs and missiles were real, not just on tv. This was in April. In 1982 it had been the Falklands War that was followed closely by a World Cup. In my simple mind at the time it was good timing. War was an inconvenience, that had to be over before the World Cup started.

Mexico was over, World Cup done for another 4 years. Two years later, Holland were European Champions and Van Basten, Gullit and Rijkaard were the players who were supposed to lead Holland to it's destiny in Italy, 1990. The story was not to have a happy ending.

The European Zico

Zico and Socrates were to have an epilogue to their, or my, 1982 adventure in Mexico 4 years later. But before that, and with me now wanting more of this major tournament football, there was France 1984, the European Championships.

In 1982 the title of 'how did they not win the world cup' was shared by Brazil and France. It baffled me how the team that played the most amazing football I had seen to date, Brazil, could lose. But all could have been forgiven, cruel cynical football world if the French with the magic midfield- Platini, Tigana, Giresse, Genghini- took over and won it all. But cynical went to a level not seen many times since when Harold Schumacher took care of Patrick Battiston in that unforgettable semi-final. So while Italy beat West Germany in the final, with Tardelli and that celebration and the eighty-something year old Italian President Pertini dancing in the stands, I looked on and thought, how did that happen?

France 1984 was the redemption tournament, where good football triumphed and the good guys were really outstanding and won. And Michel Platini was my new hero. Hours of trying to master his free-kick techniques were to follow, with limited success. But, my fix had been fed for another 2 years.

Platini scored 9 goals in an eight team tournament, including the last minute semi-final winner against Portugal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOn7jr9fkkQ

The prologue

"My work accrues sentence by sentence."
"I tend to hear them as I am drifting off to sleep. They are spoken to me, I’m not sure by whom. By myself, I know, though the source feels independent, recondite, especially at the start"
"They are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, handed to me in no particular order, with no discernible logic. I only sense that they are part of the thing."

(Pulitzer Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri).

"Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay."

Christopher Hitchens 

If I wrote out all the World Cup sentences in my head then you may get what Mr. Hitchens thinks shouldn't happen. Every memory I think of, each bit in my jigsaw, is anchored by whether it was a World Cup or European Championships year, or a 'dead' year, the odd numbered years where the Copa America would attempt to feed my craving for football in the summer. 

Sometime before 1982, Dino Zoff saved a penalty for Italy. It happened on tv. Maybe he didn't save it, but somehow the ball flew up into the air. Who took the penalty, I don't know. Italy's opponents, the tournament, the final result, I have no idea. But what I do remember is that somebody else sitting around the little tv in my parents' bedroom turned to me and said "you're so lucky". Me? Lucky? Sure. Great. 

For some reason, again beyond my full memory capabilities at the time since it was pre-1982, I had taken a liking to the look of the Italian team.  It was not the look of their defensive system, it was really the look. It may have come from a poster in a magazine that had England and Italy on either sides.The England players were standing in line, haphazardly, pre-kickoff. The Italians were in the standard two rows team photo formation in their shiny blue shirts. And the goalkeeper, in his shiny grey shirt and thick dark hair looked like the school teacher you would listen to, because even though he was grumpy and mean, you know he could also teach you something really cool. So I declared, at some point around this time, that I was a fan of Italy, to the disapproval of my England supporting family. Why this was an issue would need me to delve into a separate sociological  analysis of life in Malta.  It wasn't long before I was made to see the light. How long is hard to tell because I don't know the starting point of this story. And the light that I came to appreciate? Well, it came in the form of plucky old England being eliminated too early and Italy going on to become World Champions in 1982. But I had already become Dino to my family, and never switched to Pete or Shilts. 

There were nine years of my life before Spain '82, June 1982 in an ordinary calender. And I could put sentences together describing events that occupied my childhood. We went on a family trip to Sicily, on the ferry, and one morning our car had to be lifted (yes, by hand) out of it's bad parking spot. I hated the long life milk in Sicily. I played football with my Dad after lunch at home in the living room with the scrunched up wrapper of the made in Malta chocolate bar I was allowed to have. I had what was probably a terribly ugly Starsky and Hutch t-shirt which I loved. And I watched the bungling Frank Spencer on Some Mothers do Ave 'Em and thought he was hilarious, even though it is safe to say that Frank Spencer didn't expect me to understand most of what wasn't obvious. And, somewhere around this time period Brian Moore and Big League Soccer entered my life, every Tuesday evening. The disappointment at hearing the lady come on the tv and announce that this week Big League Soccer "didn't arrive", was forgotten when instead we got a match from the Bundesliga. It always seemed to be Borussia Moncengladbach and they had a knack of  either scoring a lot of goals or conceding more than the normal Big League Soccer team.

All this happened some time around 1982, an undetermined time period. But things were happening for me. Maybe it was Brian Moore and his calm voice mixed in with the wild joy from the fans in the stadium every time a goal was scored. A lot of goals are scored in a one hour highlights programme. Amongst these non-time specific memories were events that happened as a few stand-out moments. Years later the dates would become relevant. At around 5pm on a Saturday in May 1981 I became an Aston Villa fan, because the man listening to his radio in the sports shop my mum took me into told her that Aston Villa had just won the league and I should own a Villa jersey. A year later I tried to figure out the weird looking results of a two-legged (?) aggregate score in the newspaper of the semi-finals of the European Cup where Aston Villa had beaten Anderlecht and were to face Bayern Munich in the final. Anderlecht, Bayern Munich? What happened to Ipswich and Arsenal and Liverpool? But Bayern Munich it was. My wise father told me there was no hope for Villa. After an evening of Nigel Spink's heroics and Tony Morley crossing to Peter Withe to score the only goal, I was well and truly hooked. 

A month or so later, the fascination with this game exploded. World Cup 1982 was on tv every evening. There was excitement which I wanted to be a part of. There were fans from countries I had never heard of, they wore funny things on their heads, they had drums and they sang and danced. Teams played for draws, or won but were still eliminated. Bryan Robson scored after 27 seconds and England were good, even without the much talked about Kevin Keegan. Belgium and their Vans beat Argentina who were supposed to be good. Hungary scored 10 goals in one match. This was a party, it was amazing.

Above everything there was Brazil. They were colourful, they were fun and they scored goals in a way unlike the other teams scored.What Zico and Falcao and Socrates did captivated me like nothing else. That it was football may have been immaterial, it was that wonderful.

Post 1982 my memories become ordered. School teachers, friends, holidays. They are all there, wrapped around the many two year intervals to follow. And football not only became a constant on a Saturday afternoon at 4.45, listening to the results on BBC World Service. It also developed into one of my best teachers, primarily of Geography and History. There were simple things: Bayern Munich are from Munich, in Germany; Birmingham, Leicester, Derby, Nottingham, and more, are in the Midlands; El Salvador is in Central America, Brazil in South America. I'm sure I was ahead of all my friends at school with this knowledge. And there were the more complicated lessons, not only of history but maybe the sad state of the world. There was pretty bad stuff happening in El Salvador. Argentina and England had been in a horrible war with each other. England supporters sang songs not only about the Falklands but also about the Germans and the War. 

I wish I had a Jhumpa Lahiri-esque sentence here. It will come. Brazil 2014 will bring a few. But before that there is life, Mexico '86 to South Africa 2010, to cover.