The old man sits in a Montevideo bar, looking at the light pouring in from the window, thinking about the day he scored the winning goal in the decisive match of the first postwar World Cup. Alcides Ghiggia had cut in from the wing in the 79th minute and fired a close-range shot past the Brazilian goalkeeper, traumatising the crowd of around 200,000 in Rio de Janeiro's brand new stadium. Erected in anticipation of a home triumph, the vast Maracanã was now the site of what one commentator called “the worst tragedy in Brazil's history”: a 2-1 victory for little Uruguay.
Although no accurate count was possible as ticketless spectators scaled the walls and leapt over turnstiles, the crowd assembled in the Maracanã on 16 July 1950 is still, six decades later, the biggest ever recorded for a game of football. Fabio Grosso, who put away the last penalty for Italy in the 2006 shoot-out against France, was watched by an estimated worldwide television audience of 700 million. Like Ghiggia, Grosso is among the subjects of these portraits by the photographer Michael Donald, who spent the closing months of 2009 tracking down all the living World Cup final goal scorers.
Absent are some of the game's greatest names, including those of Garrincha, Bobby Charlton, Johan Cruyff and Diego Maradona, all of whom played in World Cup finals but did not score. George Best never even got that far. Others – such as all the prewar goal scorers, and Ferenc Puskás, Hungary's Galloping Major – are no longer with us. But the men captured by Donald embody the store of memories hoarded and cherished by generations of football fans around the world.
The most familiar face in this context is that of Pelé, still recognisably the 18-year-old who lifted the heavy leather ball over a defender before volleying it past the Swedish goalkeeper in the 1958 final, and the 30-year-old who headed the opening goal of the 1970 victory over Italy, completing the 4-1 rout with a blind pass to set up the emphatic last goal for Carlos Alberto Torres. The latter, recently the manager of Azerbaijan, is another featured here, as is Jairzinho, who scored in every round of the tournament, a record that still stands. Roberto Boninsegna, who scored their opponents' consolation goal, poses on a jetty in a wintry Italian lagoon.
Geoff Hurst, the only man to score a hat-trick in a World Cup final, looks every inch a knight of the realm – and nothing like the trilby-wearing figure of fun that he became in a chocolate bar advertisement earlier this year. Martin Peters, his 1966 team-mate, a player described by England's manager, Alf Ramsey, as being “10 years ahead of his time”, resembles a retired insurance salesman, which is exactly what he is. By contrast, Jorge Valdano, the scorer of Argentina's second goal in the 1986 final, glows with the patina of a man who has spent his middle years dividing his time between writing perceptive and often poetic football commentary and directing the affairs of Real Madrid.
Ronaldo reminds us of how he came back from mystifying failure in 1998 to score both of Brazil's goals in the 2002 final against Germany. Zinedine Zidane and Marco Materazzi evoke the extraordinary denouement of the match in Berlin four years ago, when the incomparable Frenchman, 11 minutes from the end of his career, responded to provocation by headbutting the tattooed Italian defender and was sent from the field. Both men had already scored in the match, Zidane with an audaciously chipped penalty and Materazzi with a header; Materazzi was also one of the five Italians who converted their penalties to secure victory in the shoot-out.
Not every great World Cup goal was scored in a final, of course (one thinks of the Albert-Bene-Farkas strike for Hungary against Brazil at Goodison Park in 1966, flickering across the black-and-white television screen like three thrusts of a duellist's sabre, or Dennis Bergkamp's virtuosic volley for Holland against Brazil under the Provençal sun in the 1998 semi-final). But a goal in the final, however scrappy its execution, feels like a line of history being written.
Alcides Ghiggia wrote one of those lines, and will never be forgotten for it. He is 83 now. Two years after his famous feat in the Maracanã, he attacked a referee and was banned from football for a year. His final top-flight seasons were played out in Rome and Milan, where he changed his nationality and played five times for Italy. Then he returned to Uruguay. “Only three people,” he said earlier this year, “have silenced 200,000 people in the Maracanã: Frank Sinatra, Pope John Paul II and me.”
© Guardian News and Media 2010
