Soccer: Zidane's moment of madness undermines message to 'lost' generation

Marco Materazzi falls on the pitch after being head-butted by Zinedine Zidane during the World Cup final. Picture / Reuters

It all starts and ends with Zinedine Zidane's head. The Zidane legend - the story not just of a footballing genius but of an icon of racial healing, of smiling modesty and seeming calm - began with two headed goals eight years ago.

Zidane's head, balding but not yet shaven, handsome in a Mr Spock kind of way, put two goals past Brazil in the World Cup final in Paris in July 1998. On Monday in Berlin, another missile-like Zidane header almost won a second World Cup for France. With the score at 1-1, with extra time being played, the ball was clawed from beneath the bar at the last moment by the Italy goalkeeper, Gianluigi Buffon.

Then, 10 minutes from the end of extra time in the World Cup final - and 10 minutes from the end of Zidane's glorious career - a billion people watching television all over the globe saw the quiet genius, the likeable man of peace, ram his head into the chest of the Italian defender, Marco Materazzi.

What was going through the celebrated Zidane head at that moment? What had possessed a man who had become - or been made into - a symbol for the reconciliation of the racial divisions of France and, by extension, the world?

Zidane later said Materazzi had repeated harsh insults about his mother and sister.

Zidane walked past the Italian disdainfully, at first, and then went at him like a bull and butted him. Then followed the collapse of Materazzi in theatrical disarray. Confusion. Intervention of the fourth official. Red card for Zidane. Ignominy for the man of peace. France lose on penalties.

And there is no way back. No other matches in which Zinedine Zidane, 34, can redeem himself. He had announced before the World Cup that it would be his swansong - not just for France but in any match of competitive, professional football.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Franco-German politician, leader of the 1968 Paris student revolt and a passionate football fan, summed up the moment movingly: "It was like watching the last moments of a Greek tragedy, in which the hero is revealed as human, in all his greatness and his flaws."

For such a career to end in such a way is a tragedy, and not just for Zinedine Zidane.

Other great footballers have destroyed themselves - George Best, Diego Maradona - but usually slowly, in relative seclusion, with a glass or bottle in hand. Zidane pressed the self-destruct button before the TV-watchers of the world and before 70,000 in Berlin's Olympic Stadium (an arena that became a symbol of sporting triumph over racism in the Jesse Owens Olympics 70 years ago).

Zidane the footballer did not destroy Zidane the person. He is, and will remain, a quiet family man with a much-adored wife and two sons. He will doubtless go on to have a quiet, wealthy life after football.

But on Monday, Zidane destroyed Zidane the icon, Zidane the political symbol, Zidane the myth. It was almost as if the legend of Zidane had become too great a burden for the man. There are other great players in the France team, but Zidane was the team.

Zidane, the son of North African immigrants, was France.

He had agreed, in mysterious circumstances, to return from international retirement to rescue a floundering France team a year ago. He spoke of "hearing a voice" at night - like Joan of Arc - before announcing that the voice was that of his older brother, Farid.

His return was treated by the French press as a significant political event; the unexpected sunburst that could restore the confidence of a nation depressed by high unemployment, a decade of Jacques Chirac and the defeated 2012 Olympic Games bid.

Despite his return, Zidane remained famously at loggerheads with uninspiring France coach Raymond Domenech. Zizou, not Domenech, is credited with lifting the spirit of the team after a sloppy first-round stage by coining a dressing-room battle-cry: "We live together. We will die together."

Poor Zidane. He may be the greatest footballer of his generation but not even Pele had been expected to change the course of his country's economic and political history.

Did all of this - the hero-worship, the expectations, the responsibility - finally overwhelm the man?

Although quiet, unassuming and helpful in person, Zidane has always had a low flash-point. The Italian players knew it because he spent six seasons with Juventus. In 17 years as a pro, in almost 800 matches, Zidane had been sent off 14 times before Monday - usually for retaliating against verbal or physical abuse. During the 1998 World Cup, he was sent off for stamping on a Saudi Arabian player.

On the pitch, the legend of Zidane as a man of peace and reconciliation has always been a little fragile. And yet off the pitch the legend was well deserved. And important.

To the 4 million French residents of North African origin - especially for the baggy-jeaned, reverse-baseball-cap-wearing young - Zidane is a proof that you can be a beur - a Frenchman of North African descent - and a success in 21st-century France.

There are 577 members of the French national assembly. None is of North African origin. Beur faces are still rare on French television. Apart from Zidane, it should be pointed out, there are few successful French-North African footballers. The outstanding 1998-2006 generation in French football owes much to the rich racial mixture of "Greater France", which has departments and territories on three continents.

But French football mines talent most successfully in the Caribbean and African-origin immigrant communities, which produced Lilian Thuram, Claude Makelele, Thierry Henry, William Gallas, Patrick Vieira and Sylvain Wiltord, all of whom played in the final.

All are popular in France, but none has had the wider political and social impact of Zidane; partly because he was an incomparably elegant, inventive and intelligent footballer, but more importantly because he is of North African origin.

In France, the most active racial issue is still fear of Arabs and Islam.

Hopes that the 1998 World Cup success of a brown-white-black team would have a profound effect on racial attitudes in France were long ago proved exaggerated. The xenophobic Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the second round of the presidential election in 2002. Last autumn, riots ripped through the multi-racial, deprived suburbs of scores of French cities and towns.

Interestingly, these riots were often presented by parts of the French and foreign press as a kind of "intifada" by disaffected, anti-French and anti-Western Muslim youth. In truth, the rioters looked just like the France football team: they were black, brown and white. This proves the point: fear of Arabs, or North Africans, is still the core racial issue in France.

Zidane was born in Marseille but his family comes from the Kabyle community in Algeria (which is, ethnically speaking, not Arab). No matter. To the great, white majority - haunted by racial folk memories from the Algerian war and by suspicion of young "Arab" men - Zidane was a relief; a reproach; a counter-argument; a source of joy and pride. His popularity was magnified by the fact that he seemed such an ordinary, shy, level-headed, family-loving man.

The importance of Zidane was that he offered young French people - brown, white and black - a different way of forming their prejudices.

The views of the bulk of French people were formed years ago. Even Zidane's remarkable talent would not change their views overnight. But he offered white French children a triumphant and gentle image of North Africans. He offered young beurs a positive self-image not rooted in drugs, violence or rejection of the red, white and blue.

Has all that ended with one head-butt? Not entirely. But imagine the task of the social workers in the suburbs - often North African or African themselves - trying to persuade the lost boys of the poor, suburban 14-18 age group that violence is not always the answer.

Amar is such a worker in the eastern Paris suburbs. He is of Algerian origin and a passionate fan of Zidane. He is almost in mourning. "Whatever we say to the kids now - don't fight with the youngsters from the next cite [housing estate], don't attack buses or police cars, don't set fire to cars - their answer will always be: "Et Zizou alors?" - "And what about Zizou then?"

Zinedine Zidane was born on June 23, 1972 in the northern Marseille suburb of La Castellane. At home, he was always Yazid, not Zinedine.

He lived in a tower-block apartment so small he and his parents, three brothers and one sister had to sit down to eat in shifts. His parents were, by the local standards, well off. His father worked - as a night-watchman in a department store.

"I never suffered racism when I was small because all my pals were North Africans or foreigners of some kind," Zidane once said. "Afterwards [as a football apprentice], people weren't racist either. Now, from time to time, I come across them. When people ask me for an autograph, I can tell which ones are racists. But I sign anyway."

He took no interest in school; he lived only to be with his pals, violent games of tag with a tennis ball, which lasted for hours.

From the age of five, he also played football on the strip of pink paving-stones in the housing estate's main square. There was no room for the wings. It was fated that Zizou would become a central midfielder.

His parents, Smail and Malika, emigrated from Algeria in 1953, before the war of independence. Zidane attributes much of his success to his father. They now live in a modest villa on the outskirts of Marseille, bought for them by their famous son. Yazid left home at 13 to play football for the junior teams in Cannes, then in the French first division. He made his debut at 17 in 1989. Three years later, he moved to Girondins Bordeaux, and in 1996 to Juventus, where he was an outstanding player but never an idol of the fans. (Through racism, which is rife in the Italian game? Or Zidane's rather un-Italian, or for that matter un-Algerian, surface coldness?)

In 2001, he moved to Real Madrid as one of the team's global all-stars, or "galacticos", alongside Ronaldo and David Beckham. He won the 2002 European Cup for Real Madrid with a stunningly elegant volley.

What makes Zidane such a great footballer? His one-time idol, former Uruguay and Marseille star Enzo Francescoli, says Zidane has "mystical" talents - an ability to control the ball accurately with any part of his boot and a capacity to make the ball hover between his ankles, which makes it impossible for his opponents to read what he is going to do next.

The "mystical" side of Zidane surfaced, bizarrely, a year ago when he decided to return to the France team. Talking to France Football magazine, he said: "One night I woke up suddenly and talked to somebody ... But nobody knows about it, not even my wife, no one ... An irrepressible force came over me at that moment ... I had to obey this voice, which was advising me. It's an enigma, but don't try to find an explanation. You will never find it. You will probably never meet this person. Even I cannot explain it."

After a festival of headlines in the French and international press about Zidane's encounter with a disembodied voice, the great man put out a tetchy, clarifying statement on his official website.

The voice, he explained, was his brother Farid. Zidane has barely spoken to the press since.

It was not a voice so much as a red mist that took possession of Zidane on Monday.

David Trezeguet, a teammate of Zidane at Juventus and still playing in Italy, said the Italian players had been trying to wind him up from the start of the match. All the same, a veteran professional such as Zidane should have been able to control himself.

President Jacques Chirac and the sports minister Jean-Francois Lamour went into the dressing room after the match. Chirac spoke to Zidane for a long time. Lamour refused to say what Zidane had said but told journalists that he seemed "tres, tres marque" - deeply upset.

The announcement that Zidane had been voted best player in the 2006 finals - a decision made before his expulsion - did not cheer him up.

President Chirac, at an Elysee reception for the France team, heaped praise, and love, on Zidane on behalf of the nation.

"Dear Zinedine Zidane," he said. "You are going through perhaps the hardest moment of your career - but you are a virtuoso, a genius, a man of the heart ... a man who proves that France is strong when it is united in all its diversity."

Zidane, however, failed to appear on the balcony of the Crillon hotel with the rest of the France squad after the official reception.

Chirac apart, the French press and politicians were not inclined to be too hard on Zidane. They did not blame him for losing the game. They speculated on the dastardly nature of the insults deployed by Marco Materazzi.

Mostly, press and politicians bewailed the loss of a legend.

Le Monde said in its editorial: "A man, the son of Algerian immigrants, placed on a pedestal by a whole country, whose fairy story was admired by the whole world, became with one gesture a bad example to thousands of children in the housing estates who dream of being a future Zizou."

Marie-Georges Buffet, the leader of the Communist Party, said Zidane's action was "unpardonable" and would encourage children to believe that violence was the answer to life's problems.

Only Cohn-Bendit tried to understand Zidane the man. "Those who say you have to control your temper at that level are right," he said. "But you have to remember that this is someone who has struggled to succeed all his life. He remains a child of the [poor] suburbs, which is why the suburbs identify with him ... Life is a fight for him and, yes, there are moments when you blow a fuse."

Except that Zidane did not blow a fuse. Not exactly. There were a couple of seconds when he, plainly, intended to walk away. There were another couple of seconds when he stared at Materazzi. Then he ran towards him.

It was almost as if Zizou made a conscious decision, before one billion people, to retire, not just from football ... but from the Zidane legend.

- INDEPENDENT