Saturday’s Champions League final had plenty to offer but the element of surprise was not part of it.
Real Madrid play in the European Cup final. Real Madrid win the European Cup final. It’s that simple.
Borussia Dortmund were fabulous at times in the first half at Wembley. Their inability to find an opening goal was punished by a set piece and an awful error in possession in the second half, and Real have won Europe’s premier club competition fifteen times.
You have to admire it, in spite of it all.
But that was now. This is then…
The maverick mastery of Hristo Stoichkov and Gheorghe Hagi
Thirty summers ago, the United States of America hosted the World Cup. England's qualification failure had been confirmed with no little embarrassment in November 1993, Davide Gualtieri’s record-breaking goal for San Marino putting Graham Taylor's rescue attempt tantalisingly out of reach.
Seven months feels like an eternity to a nine-year-old. England missing out seemed like the end of my world in the autumn but it was ancient history by the time June rolled around. The World Cup was here – my first, really, though I have some memories of 1990 – and if it had been liquid I'd have bathed in it. Football was my life by 1994 and I wanted it all.
A general fascination with all things American amplified my excitement and the hosts’ pre-match line-up at the Pontiac Silverdome, all stars and stripes and beards and ponytails, was all I needed to go off the deep end. Sugar might also have been involved.
The second match of the tournament took viewers to the cavernous Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. Colombia were fancied to make something happen in the sweltering North American summer but found themselves on the end of a comprehensive defeat by Romania, whose captain was Gheorghe Hagi of Brescia. At 29, Hagi was in his prime.
Romania finished top of Group A ahead of Roy Hodgson’s Switzerland as well as the host nation and a Colombia side whose exit was quickly overshadowed by genuine tragedy when Andrés Escobar was murdered in Medellín.
Hagi scored the second goal of Romania’s game against Colombia, putting them 2-0 up ten minutes before half time with an audacious knuckling chip from 30 yards out. Romania won 3-1. The goal is an undersold FIFA NFT now.
The captain scored again in defeat against Switzerland in the second group game, firing into the bottom corner from distance to establish short-lived parity, and claimed his third of the tournament to make it 3-1 in Romania’s historic 3-2 win over Argentina back at the Rose Bowl by smashing the ball right-footed beyond Luis Islas. They were knocked out on penalties by Sweden in the quarter-final. Hagi scored his spot kick in the shoot-out.
“There is something incredibly endearing about watching a short player refuse to be shrugged off the ball,” wrote the football writer Daniel Storey in Portrait of an Icon. “Hagi was like a pocket pitbull, a footballer who could surely have wrestled professionally had money ever got tight.”
Throw in a spicy temper, phenomenal ability in possession and a tendency to disappoint as readily as delight, and Storey’s assessment of Hagi as beautiful imperfection makes a great deal of sense.
The modern football fan is rightly impressed by flawlessness; it is, after all, the reward for finely tuned skill and a lifetime of hard work. But I’m a sucker for unpredictability. I like matches with mistakes and I’m fond of players prone to what music critics might refer to as dynamics. Their form spans a vast spectrum from brilliance to calamity and you never know which you’re going to get.
Hagi was capable of true genius but was unable to show it with the metronomic consistency of today’s elite. Now that is endearing.
Romania’s captain arrived in the USA as a former Real Madrid player and left it as a future Barcelona player. Both spells in Spain were notable for their lack of success at clubs with extremely high expectations.
Hagi never really gained a foothold even in struggling teams and it was only in his final stint in Turkey with Galatasaray that he recaptured the rhythm he’d achieved early in his career in Romania, and in the middle of it at a World Cup where he ignited the imagination of a little football-loving kid in Bournemouth.
If Romania’s path through to the quarter-finals in the USA made Hagi a household name in England, 28-year-old Hristo Stoichkov was elevated from household name to global superstar by his six goals for Bulgaria. They reached the last four and scratched a host of moments into world football folklore.
‘The Dagger’ powered Bulgaria’s famous semi-final charge. They were pulled apart by Nigeria in the opening match but battered Greece in Chicago in the second. Stoichkov scored two penalties in their 4-0 win.
They moved from Soldier Field to the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, where Stoichkov was instrumental in a 2-0 win over an Argentina team now shorn of their own iconic barrel-chested bottlerocket. He scored the opening goal on the hour, poking the ball past Islas after getting across his marker.
Group D ended with three teams on six points and Greece on none. Bulgaria’s second place set up a Second Round meeting with Mexico at Giants Stadium. Their goal in a 1-1 draw was an early Stoichkov top-corner piledriver and they won on penalties without needing him to take the fifth.
The quarter-final was the game that made the team. Bulgaria entered the last quarter of an hour a goal behind Germany. Stoichkov made it 1-1 with a beautifully disguised free kick. Yordan Letchkov’s famous diving header a couple of minutes later finished the job.
Stoichkov, Letchkov and their team-mates became instant legends but the semi-final – a de facto away game against Italy at New Jersey’s Giants Stadium once more – was a challenge too far. Roberto Baggio scored twice in quick succession before Stoichkov’s penalty pulled one back. It wasn’t to be for the Lions. Baggio’s tournament ended badly four days later in the final.
Stoichkov was also profiled by Storey in Portrait of an Icon: “There was a monumental gap between Stoichkov’s tempestuous nature and his calmness in front of goal. Both feet off the ground, two feet in the air, he could yet display perfect, steely focus on the ball and its path towards goal.”
“That combination of exterior volatility and momentary inner peace is one of the most crucial ingredients in football greatness.”
Stoichkov’s volatility escalated into aggression on more than a few occasions and to an unacceptable degree. He was driven and determined, fast across the turf but also quick to anger. Any ode to his football style and standards must acknowledge that violence was part of the mix.
He arrived in America as a Barcelona player and left as one too. After an avalanche of silverware in Bulgaria, he moved to Catalonia in 1990 and remained there until 1995, leaving with four consecutive league titles and a Champions League win to his name.
In 1994 he was named the best player in the world by France Football, a Ballon d’Or winner in a World Cup year to add to the Golden Shoe he claimed while he was there..
A brief spell at Parma followed before a return to Barcelona and to winning ways. Stoichkov saw out his playing career in Saudi Arabia with Al-Nassr, at Kashiwa Reysol in Japan, and, finally, back in the USA as a DC United player in Major League Soccer.
After the World Cup in 1994, Hagi and Stoichkov were united at the Nou Camp. They played together for the first time in the first leg of the Supercopa against Real Zaragoza at La Romareda, Hagi as the most attacking prong in midfield behind Stoichkov.
The Bulgarian scored in the first leg. In the second, he scored twice before a straight red card. In those few minutes of a bizarre and largely meaningless football match, Stoichkov showed how he and Hagi were the same but different.
Both had a little devilry in their game and a shortness of fuse, but Stoichkov was seldom more than a perceived slight or flash of frustration away from taking it too far.
Hagi might have appeared the more elegant, more stylish player but both combined fury and finesse. Stoichkov racked up goals by the truckload and, at his best, was inarguably world class. Hagi, for all he's loved, doesn't have the receipts to prove the same.
But in 1994, on the other side of the world, two of the far continent’s great artists each carved out a piece of World Cup history and entertained millions of new fans all over the globe. They were similar in age, born in neighbouring countries and not all that far apart.
They shared the capacity for magic as well as a temper, skill as well as sauce, and fleetingly did so in the same Barcelona team just before players of their blemished ilk became vanishingly rare at the highest level.
Football is still the best game in the world. It can still produce excitement, awe and high drama. But it's less interesting without players like Hagi and Stoichkov gliding and battering their way around its pitches.
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“The fear of the Premier League…was always that a Labour government would have a more interventionist approach than a Conservative one. Of course, the fact that one of the most economically right-wing governments in years was prepared to be more interventionist than the Premier League wanted tells its own story about how poorly football has regulated itself.”
The excellent Martin Cloake on the Football Governance Bill dropping off the agenda as the UK Parliament moved towards General Election mode.
Salty beef extracts
In Enzo Maresca, Chelsea are sticking all their chips on a Guardiola gamble (i)
Italy's oldest club, where tradition meets ambition (BBC Sport)
Half of players using snus would like to stop - study (BBC Sport)
So Coalville Town are disappearing from view... but why? (Unexpected Delirium)
Davide Nicola, Serie A’s Houdini, pulls off another escape act with Empoli (The Guardian)
‘I don’t think they know we have a national team’ – Sápmi side targets Conifa glory (The Guardian)
Wembley has lost that loving feeling, a corporate nirvana missing its soul (The Guardian)
Silent Brilliance (J. League Regista)
Dessert
adidas and the German national team are going their separate ways. This blinding ZX8000 is a collaboration with Overkill to say auf wiedersehen. Phwoar.
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