At the final whistle, it is both the loudest rumpus you have ever heard and an epic, stunned silence. When Marco Tardelli shoots from the edge of the box, Júnior is playing two Italian attackers onside and Paolo Rossi has an easy tap-in. No one, quite sensibly, gave them a hope. From Sócrates’ exuberant beard and off-field vices, to Éder’s comical free-kick run-up, to the hapless Peres in goal, we would never see their likes again. At the other end, the best chance falls, regrettably, to Serginho. Rossi goes down in the box and his doe eyes turn pleadingly to Abraham Klein for a penalty.

Against a perfunctory Soviet Union, the Seleção began scratchily, going 1-0 down after a goalkeeping howler. The Brazil team that travelled to Spain for the 1982 World Cup was the Avengers Assemble of football teams: arguably the greatest collection of individual talents ever to grace a tournament pitch. This summer’s World Cup in Brazil will, of course, be required viewing, but I wonder how long the matches and the players will stay in the memory. Brazil teams were famous for their rigid belief in concentração, or “concentration”, which was based on the unscientific belief that Brazilian men couldn’t be trusted not to have wild, ambitious sex before important games. The Brazilians depart quickly from the field, their shirts slung over their shoulders, some kissing crosses round their neck. At half-time in the dressing room, Cerezo – at fault for the second Italian goal – was sobbing hysterically.

Italy’s response to Brazil’s unfathomable attacking formation is il gioco all'Italiana (“the game in the Italian style”), a zonal upgrade of their brutalist catenaccio (“bolted door”) philosophy. Brazilians are aware that outsiders share their outrage, but you can tell they feel we are magpies on their personal bereavement. A hundred feet underneath the kite stands the Seleção – literally “the Selection”: Brazil’s national team, God's chosen footballers. Again Brazil went a goal down, but this time they replied with four: Zico’s free-kick watched motionlessly by everyone on the pitch, including Scotland’s goalkeeper Alan Rough, was the pick. 11 July 1982 Goals scored * Paolo ROSSI (ITA) 57, * Marco TARDELLI (ITA) 69, * Alessandro ALTOBELLI (ITA) 81, * Paul BREITNER (FRG) 83 “We gave it our best shot,” he concluded. And with less space on the field, the future of football lay in the counter attack, rather than elaborate attempts to pass through midfield." Three decades on, there is much about the contest that is as anachronistic as the hoardings that advertise pocket calculators. Cerezo joined up with Falcão at Roma. Italy, it pains me to write, won fair and square: they hustled, they fought and they ruthlessly capitalised on Brazilian mistakes. “The dribble, our speciality, is a waste of time, and proof of our weakness,” he once said. They help explain why a succession of Brazil sides have caught the eye for explosive breaks down the flanks rather than for the succession of midfield triangles that enraptured Cappa and everyone else in 1982. "Further success in 1994 and 2002 in mostly pragmatic, less flashy styles cemented the new philosophy and practically buried the traditional passing style further into the past. The Italians wear gleaming white Le Coq Sportif track tops with blue piping and their coaches look on in preppy, seersucker suits and aviators. On the field, he either stands still or saunters, except when he is taking a free-kick, when his run-up rivals Bob Willis’s. The physical development of the game, it was thought, meant that traditional methods had to be revised. Brazil – as they had against the USSR and Scotland – concede the first goal. The mercury has swollen to the mid-thirties this afternoon in Barcelona and inside Espanyol’s Estadi de Sarrià, meant for 44,000, at least 50,000 spectators are jammed in, fanning their match programmes to keep from passing out.

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