Fast Times

There is no sound more heartbreaking than that of an illusion being shattered. Marco Materazzi finished the game of his life screeched down from every corner of the Olympic Stadium for having the temerity to be butted by Zinedine Zidane.

It was not that he feigned injury - he was struck squarely in the chest by Zizou's tonsured pate - but because he had smashed so many certainties about a man most saw as having glacial calm: a Clint Eastwood in football boots.

Whatever Materazzi said as a provocation, however distasteful Gianluigi Buffon's impassioned protests to have the French captain dismissed, Zidane's behaviour destroyed not only his own farewell to football but what had been the finest World Cup final since Diego Maradona's Argentina traded blow for blow with Franz Beckenbauer's West Germany in 1986. The last few minutes disappeared lifelessly, the penalties when they came seemed almost an irrelevance.

Zidane had done it once before in a World Cup, in a group game eight years ago, against Saudi Arabia and in similar circumstances. A player had walked past, muttered something and Zidane had taken revenge in a way that would meet with approval in the unforgiving concrete squares of Marseille where he grew up.

Not long before, he had driven the kind of header that in 1998 had torn the World Cup from Brazil's grasp in Paris squarely towards Buffon's goal. The script demanded it strike the net but sport is not Hollywood and, if it were, Zidane, who had dragged an ageing French squad back from a chasm of mediocrity, would have scored. Whenever Zidane's great career is discussed, there will always be the queasy question of how it ended.

(Telegraph)