03 ZINEDINE ZIDANE
Before Messi and Ronaldo became the two dominant footballers of the modern age, Zizou transformed the sport into art. By Barney Hoskyns
Given how few times Zinedine Zidane played on British soil, I’m glad I watched Real Madrid at the Bernabeu on December 15, 2001 – the night I saw my favourite player of all time with the naked eye.
By Zizou’s standards, it wasn’t a standout display. Following his huge €77.5 million move from Juventus that summer, he’d only been one of Florentino Perez’s Galacticos for half a season and wasn’t yet bossing the show at the club. He didn’t score in the 3-1 win over a Real Sociedad side that boasted a young Xabi Alonso in its ranks, but it didn’t matter. There were enough touches, faints, swivels and perfectly-weighted passes to give the crowd its money’s worth.
And Zidane certainly dispelled any doubts that he could co-exist with fellow Blancos superstar Luis Figo, who netted with a cheeky penalty. In the end, it was a routine Madrid win on a cold Castilian night, but a big thrill for a visiting Englishman and his two young sons.
This was all pre-messi and pre-ronaldo, of course: the two dominant players of the modern age were yet to break into the first teams at Barcelona and Sporting. But the comparisons with both have never altered my preference for Zidane as the footballer who, more than any other, transformed the sport into art.
In some ways he was the anti-messi – 6ft 1in with no low centre of gravity, his rangy, loping, arched-over gait made him look at times more like a rugby winger than an attacking La Liga midfielder. But it was this gait that made the crucial difference to his movement and control, his ability to surge and slalom through the opposition – to suck players in and leave them for dead as he shifted the ball from right to left foot and back.
The Youtube galleries of Zizou’s ‘greatest hits’ give us moments of balletic spectacle completely denied to Messi, those long legs pulling balls out of the air, those long arms giving him almost supernatural balance.
It’s the comparison to the bionic and almost robotic Ronaldo that really points up the attributes cited by Zidane’s many admirers. The unlikely grace, elegance and, yes, beauty of his movement. The ability to create “space where there is none”, to quote his Juventus team-mate Edgar Davids. The supreme awareness of all the human parts in play around him.
This wasn’t about winning at all costs, as it has so often been for Ronaldo. It was about the spontaneous intuitiveness of the beautiful game at its most beautiful. If Real Madrid came to owe Cristiano more than they owed Zizou, few Madrilenos gasped at the skills of the Portuguese as they’d gasped at the Frenchman’s.
And then there was the more simmering side of the otherwise quiet and introverted man from Marseille: the side that suddenly flared up at sometimes routine provocation. In the 2005 match chosen for Douglas Gordon’s film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, Zizou was sent off for his part in a late brawl with Villarreal players at the Bernabeu.
The following year, in his second World Cup final and his last professional game, the Frenchman played the bull to Marco Materazzi’s red rag and was dismissed from the Berlin stage in extra time.
Some people were surprised when the shy and by now almost completely bald icon was appointed Real Madrid manager in 2016 – and when he then oversaw a renaissance which brought the club three Champions League titles in succession.
Was he the real managerial deal or was he – as more than a few experts suggested – merely lucky to have inherited a squad that included Ronaldo, Gareth Bale, Luka Modric and Sergio Ramos? Now he’s back at the club for a second spell as manager, so perhaps he can disprove the doubters once and for all.
Me, I’ll just savour the memories of sitting behind the goal at the Bernabeu for those three goals on that cold December evening – and being in the presence of Zidane’s majesty.
Barney Hoskyns is the Editorial Director of Rock’s Backpages, The Online Library of Music Journalism