The first six or seven World Cups certainly are not without their charms, but they are noticeably light on the kind of viscerally spectacular goals that we take for granted in the modern game. Hardly surprising when you contemplate what teams of the era had to endure: quagmire-like pitches, boots comprising 50% leather and 50% landfill, and balls so heavy that they basically constituted gym equipment.
Occasionally, however, a player would transcend the conditions to score a World Cup goal for the ages. For proof, head to YouTube and seek Lefter Kücükandonyadis’s thunderbolt for Turkey against South Korea in Geneva in 1954, or Pelé’s dance past several Mexicans in Viña del Mar in 1962. And Wales, on their maiden World Cup voyage, had a corker up their sleeve too.
The focus is usually on John Charles whenever the Wales team of 1958 are written about, but he wasn’t their only threat. The similarly blond Ivor Allchurch of Swansea had already scored in their 1-1 draw with Mexico, a disappointing result that forced them into a playoff with Hungary – where he scored one of the all-time great Wales goals.
In Solna, watched by a tiny crowd (including a few dozen black-clad Hungarians mourning the execution of the revolutionary leader Imre Nagy the previous day), the remnants of 1954’s Magical Magyars took a first-half lead through Lajos Tichy. But early in the second half, Charles instinctively flicked Derrick Sullivan’s pass high out to the left, where it dropped for Allchurch to meet it with a stunning volley that whizzed diagonally into the top corner. Later, a mistake by the goalkeeper Gyula Grosics gifted Terry Medwin the winner, sending Wales into a quarter-final against Brazil – but without the colossus Charles, who’d been kicked beyond repair by Hungary’s hatchet men.
Group 1 of España 82 is remembered chiefly for Italy’s struggle to grind out the three draws that enabled them to scrape into the second round, where they finally ignited against Argentina and Brazil. But Poland initially outdid them for impotence, first failing to land a glove on Italy, then fortunately surviving that rarest of things, an end-to-end goalless draw, against Cameroon.
At half-time against Peru in A Coruña, with qualification in the balance, it was again 0-0 and Poland’s dressing room was an unhappy scene. They had hit the woodwork three times in the first half, but their first goal of the tournament was still stuck in transit. The manager, Antoni Piechniczek, told his players: “If we don’t win this, for me it’ll be the end of the adventure with the national team, but for most of you too. The next manager might not pick you.” The star man Zbigniew Boniek then shook a fist and roared: “We must finally score this goal!”
The call to arms did the trick as they blew Peru away in a one-sided second half. After slow-motion defending allowed Wlodzimierz Smolarek, Grzegorz Lato and Boniek to score at their leisure, Poland conjured up one of the best team goals of the competition.
When Peru’s much-hyped playmaker Julio César Uribe cheaply lost the ball outside Poland’s box, Lato galloped downfield and Boniek dummied over his diagonal pass, letting the ball roll through to the little redhead Andrzej Buncol. Spotting Boniek’s run out wide, Buncol picked him out, and back came the return via a delectable backheel. Buncol took a touch, then crashed an emphatic finish high past the goalkeeper Ramón Quiroga. It ended 5-1, and suddenly Poland were a team transformed.
Austria’s Italia 90 campaign was a best-forgotten slog of ponderous play and crude challenges. Only once did they bring something to the party, and it came 50 minutes into their third game, too late to change the trajectory of their tournament.
Having lost 1-0 to both Italy and Czechoslovakia, Pepi Hickersberger’s team went in scoreless at half-time against USA’s college boys in Florence. Moreover, they had been reduced to 10 men, Peter Artner having been sent off for going in studs-up on Peter Vermes. Some pizzazz was sorely needed, and Andreas Ogris injected it after 50 minutes.
The flame-haired attacker reacted quickest when a USA corner was cleared, knocking the ball past Jimmy Banks in his own half and flooring the accelerator for a 60-yard run downfield at top speed. He left Mike Windischmann in his slipstream, then dinked the ball over the USA keeper Tony Meola for an exhilarating goal. “I didn’t see any Americans,” Ogris said afterwards. “I did what a footballer should do: I just ran away.”
Though Gerhard Rodax then made it 2-0, Austria’s hopes of survival took a big dent when Bruce Murray scored a farcical consolation goal near the end. “Ten players achieved a 2-1: now the quaking begins,” the Viennese paper Kurier observed, as a drawing of lots with Scotland loomed. But two days later, Daniel Fonseca’s injury-time winner for Uruguay against South Korea rendered it academic. Austria were out, and nobody would miss them.
Most TV viewers could have been forgiven for tuning out long before the end of Cameroon’s unsightly 1-1 draw with Austria in Toulouse at France 98. Cameroon spent most of the evening gleefully clobbering and clattering their opponents, abetted by the indulgent refereeing of Epifanio González Chávez. A pity, because they could play when the mood took them.
The goal that put them ahead was a diamond amid the dirt. Pierre Njanka, a 23-year-old full-back from Olympique Mvolyé, embarked on a long run down Cameroon’s left flank with 13 minutes left, gliding away from Dietmar Kühbauer with a sudden change of pace. “I was looking to pass,” Njanka recalled, “but everyone was marked. So I just kept going.”
Wolfgang Feiersinger, diving in on him too soon, was left kicking at thin air; and when big Peter Schöttel tried to cover, Njanka foxed him with a clever turn, then cocked back his right foot and cracked a sublime shot across the goalkeeper Michael Konsel.
It almost spoils the narrative to mention that Austria ripped two of the three points out of Cameroon’s hands at the death, as their warhorse Toni Polster smashed a close-range equaliser in off the bar after being left unmarked at a corner. “I wish it could have got us more than a draw,” Njanka said of his goal, “but it’s a beautiful memory.”
That Slovakia’s 3-2 defeat of Italy in Johannesburg is regarded as one of the best games of South Africa 2010 says much about the generally dire quality of that tournament. Not until the 73rd minute, when Robert Vittek put Slovakia 2-0 up, did the match lift itself out of one-paced mediocrity. But when it did…
Italy, a moribund team of past-its and never-weres, needed at least a draw to keep their title defence alive. But the manager, Marcello Lippi, unaccountably waited until half-time to throw on Fabio Quagliarella for his first (and last) taste of the tournament. The human highlight reel carried Italy throughout the second half, driving them forward and setting up numerous chances.
When he advanced on goal to be thwarted by the keeper Jan Mucha, Antonio Di Natale tucked away the rebound for 2-1. Quagliarella then had a goal disallowed for offside – but in the 89th minute Slovakia sprang for Italy’s throat again, as Kamil Kopunek dashed through to cushion an angled lob over the goalkeeper Federico Marchetti.
Game over, surely, but nobody told Quagliarella, who dragged Italy back into it with one of the most exquisite finishes witnessed in any World Cup. When the ball broke to him 25 yards out, he looked up, leaned back and caressed a gleaming chip over Mucha, who was close to his goalline and had done nothing wrong. But at the death, Simone Pepe miscued miserably wide, sealing Italy’s fate. Quagliarella wept as he left the field, and, instead of becoming a national hero, his stellar performance slid down the collective memory hole.
The columnist Declan Lynch once noted sagely that “you should never not watch a match”. While your physical health would probably suffer if you took this approach to its logical conclusion, anyone who took time to catch the unenticing meeting of Algeria and South Korea in Porto Alegre in 2014 must have been glad they did. World Cups have a pleasing habit of throwing up enjoyable ding-dongs between also-rans (think Colombia-Tunisia 1998, USA-Slovenia 2010 or Serbia-Cameroon 2022), and this was another.
By the 38th minute, Algeria were 3-0 up thanks to South Korea’s inability to deal with high balls. And though Son Heung-min pulled one back early in the second half, South Korea were finished off by a wonderful latticework Algeria move through midfield on 62 minutes.
Yacine Brahimi, impressive throughout, crowned a delightful eight-pass sequence by marauding through on the left, playing a give-and-go with Sofiane Feghouli and sliding the return ball under the goalkeeper Jung Sung-ryong. It made Algeria the first African side to score four goals in a World Cup match – and it earned Brahimi a lucrative move to Porto, where he flourished for several seasons.
Jonathan O’Brien is the author of Glittering Prize: The Story of the World Cup Vols 1-3, out now through Pitch Publishing
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