This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
For millions of people, this summer’s World Cup will be special for one simple reason. It will be their first, and — as in other areas — the first one is always memorable, no matter how objectively good or bad subsequent iterations prove it to be.
My first World Cup was 1982, one of the greatest tournaments ever. I was 12: old enough to appreciate it, too young to be cynical. As James Hilton wrote: “When you grow older you miss that eagerness. You never look forward as you once did to a single golden day. You never count the hours to it: you never see some moment ahead beckoning like a goddess across a fourth dimension.”
Football was winter, in every way: players streaked with mud, heavy-coated crowds rumbling with gruff anger. But Spain ’82 made it a summer game: the pitches like green baize, the carnival sounds of drums, horns and trumpets.
The TV pictures were slightly blurry and the commentary a touch muffled, enhancing the sense of exoticism. I had a keyring featuring the official mascot Naranjito, and I carried this piece of plastic tat around as though it were the Holy Grail.
Most of all, it was a tournament of heroes and villains. Long before social media, saturation coverage and petrodollar squillions, Brazil arrived like gods from a distant galaxy. Their golden shirts seemed to glow from within. Watching them was like watching ballet: they were so easy, so fluid, flowing like mercury, never seeming to strive.
Every Brazil match was an event, and every afternoon between those matches was spent trying to replicate Sócrates’s thunderbolt against the USSR or Éder’s chip against Scotland or Zico’s scissor-kick against New Zealand.
So when Brazil play Italy for a place in the semis, the result looks preordained. Italy have been prosaically lumpen and seem to embrace their status as antagonists: flares and fireworks make their end of the stadium look infernal, and men like Claudio Gentile know so much about the dark arts that they could teach at Hogwarts.
Paolo Rossi, just back from a match-fixing ban, scores first. Brazil don’t seem bothered. Their attitude is simple: no matter how many you score, we’ll score more. Sócrates puts them level a few minutes later. Rossi scores again. Art Garfunkel lookalike Falcão makes it 2-2. Rossi, sallow and vampiric, puts Italy ahead for a third time: the undead, still coming back for more no matter how many stakes go through their hearts.
That gnawing feeling of disbelief: is this really happening? To Brazil and all the enchanted dreams they carry? Canary shirts besiege the Italian goal: the Azzurri backed up deep in their area, throwing themselves in front of every shot. On the stroke of full time, Oscar thumps a header goalwards. Dino Zoff, 40 years young, clutches it to his chest like a newborn baby, and that is that.
Brazil’s players walk from the pitch like trauma victims, alternately crying or unseeing, undone by the fragility of their own beauty; and with them goes my not-yet-teenage heart. Years later, when I see Reginaldo Manente’s monochrome photograph of José Carlos Vilella Jr, ten years old and caught between sobs, it takes me straight back to that day.
Cut to Heroes and Villains Mark 2: the semi-final between France and West Germany. The French are cavaliers, centred around the incomparable Michel Platini: “the lead violin in a sophisticated midfield string quartet”, as one journalist calls him. The Germans are roundheads, an almost comical collection of national stereotypes: the Aryan blond Förster brothers, the one-man Panzer division that is Hans-Peter Briegel, the keeper Harald Schumacher with his über-Eighties perm and moustache.
The sudden whiplash shock of Schumacher’s second-half assault on Patrick Battiston, clattering him so hard with hip and forearm that Battiston is unconscious before he’s even hit the ground. Platini is first to reach him. “He had no pulse; he looked so pale. I thought he was dead.” Schumacher, unbelievably, escapes punishment.
France go 3-1 up in extra time, each goal a small triumph for the angels. But as with Brazil, the qualities which make them such a joy to watch now cost them the match. They must win by being swashbuckling or not at all: and, one by one, they run themselves into the ground and let the Germans back in.
Life lessons for a 12-year-old boy: the good guys don’t always win.
The final feels like it will be a damp squib. But then, something extraordinary happens. When Marco Tardelli scores Italy’s second goal, he races away in delirium: fists clenched, head shaking, yelling as he sprints. It’s neither rehearsed nor choreographed: simply a man lost in a moment more seismic than all but a few have ever known. “I was born with that scream inside me,” he says later. “That was just the moment it came out.”
I’ve been to Italy several dozen times since then, and each time I’ve had the same whimsical daydream. I’d see Tardelli in a restaurant, shake his hand and tell him not only what that moment meant to young me, but also how primal and atavistic it still feels. He’d smile and thank me.
For me, it would be a moment to treasure; for him, one of many, many thousands of such encounters over the past 44 years. But that’s the point. This is the beautiful game, here are its fans and we are legion.
