Suddenly one summer. The French took their World Cup with a pinch of salt. Fearing the worst for their artisan team they remained detached, withholding their passion until it had been earned over and over again. Then one Sunday night France exploded. What a tale. It began in Marseille with the home town boy Zinedine Zidane struggling to find his footing. It ended in Paris, an evening of warm breezes and fireworks, with the balding genius scoring twice with his head as France conjured up a performance for eternity.
The French were the sporting story of the year, a team managed by a prissy little manager, Aime Jacquet, who drew the derision of their own people all the way to the finals and then seduced them slowly with an adventure that combined doggedness with moments of sublime panache.
It was engaging to watch the French knock down the pundits one by one. Their gifted defence elevated the negative side of the game to a thing of beauty. You could as easily watch a highlights film of Desailly and Thuram in action as you could watch 60 seconds of Bergkamp and Kluivert's work.
The midfield worked hard and sometimes it worked well. The attack didn't work at all. Oh, and the bald goalkeeper was eccentric bordering on mad. Yet somehow they did it, slayed all their ghosts and self-doubts and rose to their own occasion with a sense of pride and nationhood that was wonderful to watch.
We will always wonder what precisely ailed Brazil in the World Cup final - they were insipid and pale and Ronaldo was a halfhearted ghost. Yet Brazil's frailties should never be allowed detract from the magnificence of the French metamorphosis. Half of the winning of a game is getting the team on to the pitch in the right state of mind. The French came to play.
So did the Dutch and the Argentinians and the Croatians and the critical mass of the sides who contrived to make this one of the great soccer tournaments of all time. All over the place little outbreaks of beauty were ambushing us. A big Australian was banging them in for the cautious Italians. The Moroccans were full of game invention. The Jamaicans lit up the place without playing nice football. The Japanese were intense but at times their game sparkled. As a tournament it sprawled all over the dreamland that is France. Sleek trains ran us through the steel arteries from post-modern Montpellier in the south to little Lens in the north. The grounds were things of beauty in themselves, the towns were welcoming and gay, the sun was friendly without being overbearing and the organisation was flawless. Then there was England and the colossal ego-driven vacuity of Glenn Hoddle. To watch Hoddle in action was to spectate as a man wandered out of his depth but worried only about his appearance. Hoddle's post hoc rationalisations about selections and players would have been comical if the atmosphere surrounding the England team hadn't been so unrelentingly bitter.
Michael Owen shimmered golden in the French sun for a few moments, but England's campaign scarcely lived up to the hype which preceded it or the sentiment which followed it. More painstaking footage has been devoted to that fateful evening in St Etienne when England were dispatched by Argentina than has been devoted to the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.
England, in the hope of bringing the World Cup to their shores (which hosted Euro 96 so wonderfully, it should be said), have airbrushed the French campaign. In end of season round-ups it has become golden. The reality for those of us who were with them in Marseille and Lens, even Toulouse and St Etienne, is that the English presence soured the tournament. Leaving towns strewn with rubble and debris was the enduring legacy of the supporting caravan. A bad taste was what the team left behind. Bitter and surly in their relations with media and fans, their ugly paranoia defied the spirit of the tournament. If soccer is sick England is the epicentre of the malaise.
England's departure in mid-tournament had almost as much inevitability about it as Scotland's first round bow out. For a nation with such an unblemished record of failure on the world stage the Scots travelled to St Etienne for their crunch game with Morocco carrying excess baggage in the hubris department. Several golden goals and a sending-off later, the traditional fatalism returned to accompany them home. We will remember other moments. Iran and the US in Lyon one balmy Sunday evening. The Americans, with a foreboding of the footballing disaster which was to come, strangely struggling to damp down the flaring nationalism which engulfed the game. The Iranians setting the bar even higher. It passed off with high, good spirits. It was this reporter's fortune to see the Dutch play all but one of their games. For a nation with a reputation for loud arrogance they produce breathtaking, friendly splashes of colour on match days. We travelled by train from St Etienne back to Lyon on the evening the Dutch played Mexico and the fans of both nations sent frothy Mexican waves rolling down through the carriages as the train sped onwards. Farmers and children waved from the fields and the night was filled with laughter. To be a sports hack with copy filed and half the World Cup still to come was to have the best job in the world.
It was a fine World Cup. Well organised and friendly and if the final wasn't an emphatic classic, it was better than any seen since the 70s and all the more memorable for having produced a home win which illuminated a gracious host nation. There were more good matches than any World Cup in recent memory. Fewer nightmare games. We Irish weren't there and although it won't suit us to think so, the event didn't suffer in the slightest without us.
