11 RIVALDO
Balletic genius, World Cup winner and scorer of football’s best hat-trick, so why don’t we all worship this star from Brazil? By Andrew Murray
There are hat-tricks, and then there are hat-tricks. On Sunday, June 17, 2001, Barcelona had to beat Valencia to salvage Champions League football from the wreckage of a disastrous campaign that had begun with Luis Figo crossing a bitter divide to Real Madrid, and got worse from there. Los Che just needed a draw.
Step forward Barça’s totem: Rivaldo. The Brazilian’s treble – a 30-yard free-kick, a long-range smash and, in the 87th minute, a scarcely credible overhead kick from the edge of the penalty area – were goals of such skill that each finish deserves monuments, paintings and operas dedicated to their visionary beauty. The Catalans won 3-2. The Camp Nou erupted. “I dedicate the winning goal to all the players who have fought so hard all season and all the supporters who have suffered so much,” said a beaming Rivaldo,
who was yet to be fully embraced by Cules at that point. “I’m delighted to have made them happy.”
If ever a performance crystallised one individual’s talent in a 90-minute period, this was it. Comparing this hat-trick to, for example, Dirk Kuyt’s March 2011 treble (from a cumulative seven yards) for Liverpool against Manchester United is like putting Chopsticks on a par with Debussy’s Clair de lune because they’re both played on the piano.
“Scoring that goal was incredible,” Rivaldo told FFT in April 2002 of his piece de resistance, the bicycle kick. “I’ve scored a lot of good goals but, because of the importance, that was the best one.”
He was right on both counts. A genius with the ball at his feet, Rivaldo glided effortlessly past defenders and combined the balance of a ballet dancer with an assassin’s killer instinct.
“Each time he ran with the ball into the box, I was confident that he’d at least get a shot off,” Brazil’s World Cup-winning captain, Dunga, explained to FFT in 2015. “And he was equally good as an attacking midfielder or as a striker. For a time, he was one of the best players in the world.”
That time was Rivaldo’s six years spent in Spain with Deportivo La Coruna and Barça, winning back-to-back league titles and a double. He scored 152 goals in 281 club games between 1996 and 2002, winning both the Ballon d’or and World Player of the Year in 1999.
“What people don’t appreciate is how he played for the team,” Frank de Boer told FFT in 2011. “In 2000-01 he scored 23 league goals for our Barcelona team, but he also made the same number of assists.”
Rivaldo’s career was a minor miracle. Born in one of Recife’s poorest favelas, he sold drinks and sweets on the beach to supplement the family income. His trademark bowlegged gait was a scar of childhood malnourishment. That upbringing shaped him: in Rivaldo’s mind, he owed nothing to anyone because it was he who had made something of himself. He was often surly in interviews – “a kind of autism” one Spanish reporter remarked – which is why it took Barcelona fans so long to appreciate what they had.
Such intransigence was at the root of his biggest controversy. In stoppage time of Brazil’s 2002 World Cup group-stage win over Turkey, a frustrated Hakan Unsal kicked a ball in the Brazilian’s vague direction. It hit him on the knee but Rivaldo rolled on the floor in agony, clutching his face, ensuring Unsal was sent off.
An act of World Cup skullduggery does not always a villain make. Zinedine Zidane’s headbutt on Marco Materazzi served the ultimate postscript to a glorious career – an uncontrollable fit of rage with an added element of cool because Zizou refused to talk about it. But this was different.
“It was an act so despicable,” frothed The Guardian the following day, “that it deserves to rank alongside Toni Schumacher’s assault on Patrick Battiston or even the Hand of God.”
However, Rivaldo was comically unrepentant over his play-acting, like a flip-flopping politician attempting to justify a U-turn when a shiny promotion is dangled in front of them. “I was glad to see the red card,” he said at full-time. “Creative players must be able to express themselves if football is to stay a beautiful game.
“There is too much foul play and violence in football. It doesn’t matter where the ball hit me – it was only the intent that mattered.”
Perhaps this – along with the slow, itinerant nature of his career death spiral at Milan (Rivaldo made only cameo appearances during the Rossoneri’s Champions League-winning campaign), Olympiakos and beyond, until his eventual retirement in 2015 – is why Rivaldo is rarely mentioned in the same breath as Ronaldo and Ronaldinho, the other members of the Three Rs who enchanted so in Brazil’s 2002 World Cup win.
Rivaldo had absolutely everything. Except a right foot. In truth, as Valencia found out on one balmy June day in 2001, he didn’t even need that.
RIVALDO COMBINED THE BALANCE OF A BALLET DANCER WITH THE KILLER INSTINCT OF An ASSASSIN