maybe it’s better if I go. In the end, though,
it passed. Everything always passes.”
The Champions League semi-final against
bitter rivals Barcelona – the first time there
had been a European Cup Clasico since 1960- proved a turning point. The first leg was
at the Camp Nou on April 23, the festival of
Catalonia’s patron saint Sant Jordi, when it’s
tradition to exchange roses and books. As
the Madrid coach approached the ground,
however, most Barça fans swapped flowers
and Shakespeare for rocks and actual
spears. Zidane and his team-mates threw
themselves on the floor as missiles rained
down on the bus and through its windows.
This was war.
“I lived that for [former club] Juventus
against Fiorentina, too,” remembered Zizou.
“Bang, bang, bang, bang. ‘Maybe this is
normal,’ I said to myself. ‘They just want to
attack you; they don’t love you’. But it maybe
gives you more tension, more motivation.
You get into the zone.”
Channelling his inner Hulk, Zidane scored
a delicious second-half dink over Roberto
Bonano to put Los Blancos on their way to
a superb 2-0 victory. “What I will always
remember was the return to Madrid,” he
later told FFT. “There were 5,000 people at
the airport, saying ‘gracias for the goal!’
The people wanted to eat me.”
The Madrid fans finally onside, Zidane
went one better in the final. On the stroke
of half-time, and the score at 1-1 after Lucio
had equalised Raul’s early opener, Zidane
faced his destiny. In 1960, Di Stefano, Puskas
& Co had an entire 90 minutes to create their
masterpiece – Zidane had the three seconds
it took Roberto Carlos’ looping cross to drop
out of the Hampden sky.
“What I’m thinking is, ‘I’m going to shoot’,”
he told FFT in 2013. “I shift sideways and
look to see where the goal is for a second,
because I have time to think. First time. I’m
going to hit it.”
What followed was Nijinsky, Nureyev and
Baryshnikov all rolled into one. Zidane’s wife
Veronique gave up a career as a professional46 July 2022 FourFourTwo
unnecessary flicks on the halfway line or
a crowd’s moments of hushed awe as stats
because they’re not direct contributors to
the brutalist function of winning matches.
But you could feel them.
Twenty years ago, however, Zidane came
as close as anyone before or since to showing
how doing something just because you can
may also provoke something spectacularly
useful. On May 15, 2002, Zizou watched
a ball plummet from the Scottish night’s sky,
swivelled on his right foot and thrust his
weaker left to shoulder-height. The volleyed
goal of such startling, impossible beauty that
followed deserved its own museum. It also
won Real Madrid the Champions League and
beatified a modern football god.
“Without your art, you are nothing”
Goals like Zidane’s against Leverkusen just
shouldn’t happen. These showpiece events
are usually littered with an unremitting
drudge of mediocrity between two teams
desperate not to make a costly mistake.
Individuality and creative thinking are actively
discouraged at the expense of team shape,
limiting space and eventually finding a way
to win. Playmakers in Champions League
finals exist as an afterthought, like a work
experience kid tossed a throwaway crumb to
keep them busy: get the ball, see if you can
do something with it, but mainly remember
your responsibilities to your co-workers.
Forty-two years before the howitzer that
ensured Zidane’s deification, on the same
Hampden Park pitch in Glasgow, his Madrid
forebears proved there was another way in
a European Cup final if you were touched by
a higher power. When Alfredo Di Stefano
and Ferenc Puskas scored every Real Madrid
goal – the latter four, to the former’s three –
in a 7-3 destruction of Eintracht Frankfurt in
the 1960 final, ingenuity triumphed over
pragmatism for Los Blancos.
Madrid were under intense pressure in
Glasgow in 2002. That March, a faltering side
had lost the Copa del Rey final to Deportivo
La Coruna – staged at their Bernabeu home
to mark the club’s centenary – in one of the
greatest upsets in Spanish football history.
Later, Madrid won just one of their final five
league games as they gifted the league to
Rafa Benitez’s Valencia. Zidane’s arrival for
a world-record €78 million at the beginning
of the season – 12 months after Luis Figo’s
controversial defection from Barcelona for
a then-record fee – was supposed to herald
a deluge of trophies for president Florentino
Perez’s Galacticos project, not a series of
embarrassing near-misses. The Frenchman,
too, was feeling the pressure. After four
goals in his first six games of the campaign,
Zidane – an intensely private man – struggled
to display his sublime skills to an unconvinced
public which mistook his inherent shyness
for aloofness.
“The first three months were difficult,” he
later admitted to FFT. “The media chased me
everywhere, photographers were everywhere,
and I thought, ‘What is all this?’ I remember
at one point saying, ‘a lo mejor me voy’ –
Above Zidane
waits for the
ball to drop at
Hampden Park;
and whelps it
in the top binsZInEDInE
ZIDAnE