The Best Football Player In The World TM
Football
is the purest game on Earth when played by such
a man.
He doesn't simply drive the ball through the field with
unearthly dexterity, no, we're not talking about a mere
Ronaldo here. We're talking about a man who dances around the ball,
mistifying his opponents by his feline gestures. I remember seeing him once, cornered by two defenders against the field limit,
and before anyone (including myself) could understand anything, he had simply
vanished and reappeared - behind the defenders - and was running towards the
goal. "Swish, swish, look at me - I'm
wind".
These skills, however impressive, are not sufficient to reach (and keep) the
grade of Best Football Player In The World
tm. Zidane has two other
capacities that make him a
deadly weapon :
- Insight: Within a glance, he knows exactly what the situation is, what it
will be in the next second, and how he must react. His vista of the game
makes him the natural leader of his team(s), the one in charge of actually
creating, organizing and managing the action. And, tell you what, he's damn
good at it.
- Precision: He can put the ball exactly where he wants within a 30 meters radius. In
combination with the speed of attackers such as Thierry Henry and Nicolas
Anelka, this turns the French football team into a multi-headed nuclear
missile.
Most people who reach
The Top in their domain (be it
sport,
music,
business or whatever) tend to behave dubiously 'off the pitch'. As far as
football is concerned,
Maradona is the best example. Well, Zidane is the
perfect
counter-example : quiet, softly-spoken, self-admittedly shy though
warm and intelligent. A man you'd love to have as a neighbour, a
son-in-law,
or simply a
pal.
Zidane is nothing short of a
hero in his native city of
Marseilles, where
football has been promoted to the rank of
religion - and indeed the
Stade
Vélodrome attracts much more people weekly than all the
churches,
temples and
mosques of the city together. A giant portrait of "
Zizou" has
been placed by his sponsor
Adidas on the wall of a big building that
overhangs the
port - if you come to Marseilles by sea, you just can't miss
it.
But what makes Zidane an ideal hero for modern
France is his origins. You may
have noticed that "Zinedine Zidane" does not sound very French. Zidane is the
3rd son of
Algerian migrants (
Kabylians, more accurately) who settled in
France in the 60s. The massive waves of immigration from
Northern Africa
induced tensions in French society, and
Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front routinely reached 15% in national elections. Zidane is the perfect exemple of
successful
"integration": he is kindness personified, he proudly wears
the colours of France, and the only accent he has is
Marseillais. When Jean
Dupont (the French
Joe Smith) looks at Zidane, he doesn't see an Algerian, he
sees a Frenchman no different from him.
When the French team won the
World Cup in 1998 with Zidane as their
leader, the
Arc de Triomphe was decorated with a giant "Zidane for President"
sign. A million people on the
Champs-Elysées cheered and waved
tricolore flags. For the first time, France was proudly branding itself as
a multiracial nation with a unique and unified culture. Soon afterwards, for
seemingly unrelated reasons, the
National Front collapsed. Today the
far right's scores are negligible, and the French football team recently managed to win the
never-attained
Grand Slam: World Cup and European Championship in a row. The best football team in the world, with Zinedine Zidane at its head, joyfully propelled France into the 21st century.