Zizou revels in Indian summer

So the audit is in. Sixty-two games of football in 12 different cities. An extraordinary mass mobilisation of people, nomadic tribes who needed to be present for some of the 141 goals, the 329 yellow cards, the 26 red cards, the tears and the hugs as we whittled 32 sides down to just two.

Italy and France. They meet for the championship of the world on Sunday evening in Berlin. Defiance has been the theme of this World Cup. Italy and France have defied magnificently; they have defied scandal and age and rumour and division. There have been sweeter football teams but there haven't been better stories.

Last night it was the French who prevailed - their aged team recalling every trick and pattern in Munich as they tipped Felipe Scolari's Portugal out of the competition. In the first half there was only the thickness of a cigarette paper between the sides. Typically it was Zinedine Zidane who had inserted that piece of paper with a well-taken penalty just after the half-hour.

For the rest of the game France consolidated, and as the second half wore on it became clear Portugal just hadn't the strength to pull themselves back into contention. France duly won the lesser of the competition's two semi-finals.

Thus we have an unlikely epilogue to the story of France's golden generation. Winners of the World Cup in 1998 and the European Championships two years later, they have been lamented and written off ever since. This Indian summer will be the last goodbye.

Zidane is the darling of this World Cup. Having vanished from the French side in August of 2004, he recanted and came out of retirement a year later to save France's qualification campaign. He did so, he said, because a voice spoke to him.

Zidane was born in Marseille and raised in La Castellane, one of the immense housing projects in the north of that city. His tough, Algerian background has made him an emblem of recent French sides, who have come to represent a different, modern and multiracial France.

For two months now he has been saying goodbye. Real Madrid, who made him the most expensive player in the world, wore special jerseys for his final game, with the legend "Zidane 2001-2006" under the club crest. His club could manage only a draw on that day, and we suspected his farewell to the international stage would be just as lacking in glitter. Wrong. He has dragged France through the knockout stages and become the story of this competition.

The arrival of two young wide players seems to have been enough to revitalise him. Florent Malouda and Franck Ribery, the young man with the face stolen from a Marcel Pagnol novel, have worked and fetched and drawn water for the great man, leaving him to scheme and to taunt as the pilot of the team.

Sunday's final is pregnant with intrigue. Fabio Cannavaro's excellence in defence for Italy has been a huge part of their success. Will he pick up Zidane or will the Frenchman play too far back for that? For the Italians this journey has been as emotional as for the French. With the reputation of the domestic game in ribbons, the Italians came to a World Cup which had dumped them into the Group of Death.

Somehow they have emerged managing to look stronger with every outing, as if they are learning the game as they go along.

Their heroes are defenders Gianluca Zambrotta and Cannavaro and the 11 goals they have scored have been divided between 10 players, with only (ironically) the misfiring Luca Toni managing more than one score.

Italy have maintained their recent record of making the final every 12th year (1970, 1982, 1994 and 2006), but with France's progress to the final dance another piece of World Cup trivia fell. On Tuesday Germany lost in Dortmund for the first time ever. Last night Scolari lost his first ever World Cup game. Scolari is big enough and wise enough to know there could be no better author of his misfortune than the man they call Zizou.