*this article originally featured in Futbolista Magazine
August 15th 2001 - Reigning World and European champions France take on Denmark in a friendly match in Nantes. A match notable for being Zinedine Zidane’s first game since his world record breaking move from Juventus to Real Madrid. Zizou was now a Galáctico.
Les Bleus goalkeeper Fabien Barthez throws the ball 40 yards to Zidane out on the left side of his own half. It’s a bit of a hospital pass, truth be told. If you’re wondering how a 40-yard throw could be described as a hospital pass, meet Fabien Barthez – a man who himself could be the subject of a 10,000 word thesis titled The Madness of Man which would no doubt sound very cool in French.
Alfredo Di Stefano once described Zinedine Zidane as playing “as if he had silk gloves on each foot”. While that quote does stray a bit into the territory of a “mate, what about hats but for feet” conversation you have at 5am at an afters before you realise all you’ve done is invent socks, it does fairly accurately convey the elegance and guile with which Zidane played the game. He was the master of the cushioned first touch; wielding an Adidas Predator with lissom grace and poise to pluck balls out of the air.
Zidane didn’t quite experience the game of football the same way mere humans did. The pitch, the ball, the twenty-one other players; it was all just computer code to him. He saw his surroundings reduced to their inner mechanics. Piles of 1s and 0s running around in a continuous flow of real-time information ready to be re-written to suit his will. So, as you might imagine, Zidane was unphased by the sight of his eccentric goalkeeper’s careening throw hurtling towards him. He anticipates the landing of the ball and controls it with the most outrageous of Cruyff turns - in one fluid motion gliding away from the oncoming Thomas Helveg and buying himself what seems like the freedom of Nantes to run into. A first touch for the ages.
Helveg may take some succour from the fact that this was a friendly match from nearly two decades ago. There were no names on the back of the players’ shirts – he could conceivably show people the YouTube clip and pass it off as someone else? He could tell them it was one of his Danish teammates at the receiving end of this humiliation. Why not, eh? Quite un-hygge though, identify fraud, isn’t it? Still, previously established laws of reality tended to go a bit funny when Zidane was on a pitch, so we might let him off.
Cancel your weekend plans and search “Zidane touch vs Denmark” on YouTube.
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