There’s no sport like football for it’s ability to garner clichés, and there’s nobody like a football pundit for flying in the face of their own clichés whenever it suits them. So after nine months of of “it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon”, “you can’t judge a team on one game” and “it’s what you do over the season that counts”, 32 teams have just three group games and four knockout matches to earn the right for football’s mythmakers to declare them the best team in the world for the next few years.Clearly this is inherently ridiculous. Nobody – bar the keenest hyperbolists of the tabloid press – would draw any firm conclusions about the title credentials of a domestic team based on so few matches and the unreliability of one-off knockout matches is exactly why the FA Cup winner isn’t used as a barometer for the best team in the country. Any rational analysis would tell you luck and form – not just quality alone – will determine who’ll be celebrating and who’ll be suffering when July 11 comes.
The brilliant thing about this is it creates a glorious democracy where any team - and better still any player – can find a string of good performances at the right time can earn them recognition as one of the best in the world, even if it’s mere months before they slip back into obscurity.
In this piece I celebrate five players whose performances at the World Cup earned them a billing the rest of their careers never quite matched.
5.Ilie Dumitrescu (Romania, 1994)
Along with Gheorge Hagi and Florin Răducioiu, Ilie Dumitrescu was a star of Romania’s journey to the quarter finals of the 1994 World Cup but never managed to recapture the same form in his club career. His move to Tottenham was undermined by a sex scandal (later proven to be fabrication) and Tottenham’s struggles under Ossie Ardiles’ adventurous 3-2-5 formation. Before long Dumitrescu was packed off on loan to Seville. When they baulked at the fee Spurs demanding Harry Redknapp then signed him for West Ham but work permit issues scuppered the move. After two years in the Mexican leagues and half a season back in Romania, Dumitrescu retired in 1998 aged just twenty-nine with his best days firmly behind him.
4. Trevor Sinclair (England, 2002)
It’s not uncommon for players to creep into the team for the World Cup due to injuries (Geoff Hurst being the classic example) but Sinclair’s route to the finals was gloriously convoluted. Sinclair was a late replacement for Danny Murphy, who himself might not have been in the squad had Steven Gerrard not been injured and it was only an injury to Owen Hargreaves against Argentina that led to Sinclar being on the pitch at all. Taking over a left-midfield slot that had been covered by such natural left-wingers as Hargreaves and, erm, Emile Heskey, Sinclair earned four of his twelve England caps during the tournament and briefly became one of England’s most important players.
As a young player Sinclair had been tipped as a future star and a purple patch at QPR in the mid-90s had seen him linked with a host of top clubs. In 1996-1997 he won the goal of the season award for a spectacular overhead effort against Barnsley in the FA Cup. But by 2002 Sinclair was 29 years old and it looked like both the elite clubs and an international football career had passed him by. The World Cup didn’t exactly send the big clubs hammering down the door but Sinclair played a key role in England’s march to the quarter-finals and arguably his presence gave the English midfield balance it’s lacked ever since.
Sinclair wasn’t the only player to make the 2002 England team through injuries and briefly excel. Both Nicky Butt (for Gerrard) and Danny Mills (for Gary Neville) stepped in at the last minute and reached a peak never repeated in the remainder of their international careers.
3. El-Hadj Diouf (Senegal, 2002)
Although it was Papa Baba Diop who got the shock winner against holders France in the opening match of the 2002 World Cup, it was 21 year old striker El-Hadj Diouf who stole the show. Contrary to popular belef Diouf had already signed for Liverpool by the time the World Cup started but his performance in Seoul made people believe Houllier’s decision to sign an unknown striker from Lens for £10 miliion, at the expense of making a permanent move for loanee Nicholas Anelka, was something of a masterstroke. This feeling only intensified as Diouf spearheaded a shock Senegalese charge to the quarter-finals.
Sadly for Diouf, and catastrophically for both Houllier’s job and Liverpool’s title ambitions, it didn’t quite work out that way. Two goals on his home debut represented two thirds of his total league goals of that season and the following year he became the first Liverpool number nine ever to not score a single league goal in a season. Spitting controversies and diving accusations did little to help matters and by the 2004-2005 season Djouf had been loaned to Bolton. His time at the Reebok stadium helped rebuild his reputation on the pitch and he’s since carved out a career at mid-table Premier League clubs. Off the pitch controversy continues to dog him however and 2010 has already seen arrests for alleged motoring offences and an allegation of assault ona charity worker.
His fellow Senegal starts from 2002 also descended from the peak of their stardom to settle at mid-Premier League clubs. Salif Diao joined Diouf a move to Liverpool after Japan/South Korea and was hailed by then-manager Gerard Houlier as the “new Patrick Viera”. However he failed to impress and in 2005 when Rafa Benitez instead declared newly-signed Mohamed Sissoko as the “new Patrick Viera” it was pretty clear the writing was on the wall Injury derailed loan spells with Birmingham and Portsmouth and Salif Diao eventually dropped to the Championship to join Stoke, remaining as a bit-part player as they’ve established themselves in the Premier League. Meanwhile Papa Baba Diop, Senegal’s goalscorer in Seoul, struggled at Lens before more successful spells at Fulham and Portsmouth .
2. Salvatore “Toto” Schillachi (Italy, 1990)
Salvatore Schillachi scored seven goals in his sixteen appearances for his country. It just so happened that six of these were in his five starts and two substitute appearances at Itaia ’90, winning him to golden boot and propelling him to global stardom; a feat even more remarkable as Schillachi had been playing in Serie A for just a year and his substitute appearance against Austria in Italy’s opening game of the tournament was actually his debut for the Azzuri.
Sadly Schillachi never again scaled these heights for club or country. Injuries and poor form meant his promising start at Juventus petered out and a move to Inter Milan failed to reignite his career. His only other noteworthy career achievement came in 1994 when he became the first Italian to play in the Japanese J-League. Critics pondered what had gone so dramatically wrong to precipitate his decline from world-beater to also-ran but the simple truth was that Schillachi was a decent player who’d picked a damn good moment to display the form of his life.
1. Roger Milla (Cameroon, 1990 & 1994)
Roger Milla actually signed for his first club in Cameroon in 1965, a full quarter of a century before he finally found international stardom. At 24 he was named the 1976 African Footballer of the year (a far less prestigious and high-profile award than it is today) and earned a move to France, where he had a 13 year career with 5 different clubs where he followed a general pattern of being a prolific goalscorer in the second division and somewhat less so in the top flight. He first appeared in the World Cup in an unremarkable Cameroon team in 1982 who, on their appearance in the tournament, crashed out in the first round have drawn all three games and scored just one goal. By 1987 he’d retired from international football and in 1989 he’d quit from the French League and had moved to the obscure French territory of Réunion in the Indian Ocean and was playing for a local club way down the football ladder.
Which makes it all the more insane that a year later, aged 38, he was called by the Cameroon President and asked to reconsider his retirement and play in Italy. What happened next is the stuff of legend. Cameroon became the first African team to ever reach the World Cup quarter finals and Milla’s 4 goals and trademark goal celebration turned him into an international superstar. Four years later he played again in the US and his goal against Russia made him the oldest ever goalscorer at a World Cup.
Milla eventually retired from the game in 1997 after four years in the Cameroon league and three years in Indonesia but his legacy lives on. In 2004 he made it into the FIFA 100 and in 2006 he was named by CAF as the greatest African player of all time, a feat made all the remarkable by the fact it was pretty evident from his club career that it wasn’t really true, perhaps the biggest possible indication of the power of five good performances at the World Cup to define an entire career.
by Paul Hawkins
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