Mexico 70: The Summer Football Met Its Gods

There are World Cups you remember for the trophy lift, and there is Mexico 1970, which you remember the way the devout remember a revelation.

Something happened over those three weeks at altitude that football has spent more than half a century trying to live up to and has never quite managed. If this place is about the moments that turned the game into something close to worship, then this is where the religion was founded.

Start with the building. The Estadio Azteca sat more than 2,200 metres above sea level, a vast concrete bowl in air so thin that European lungs burned by half time, and into it FIFA poured the first World Cup ever beamed live and in colour to the watching world. For the first time, families from Glasgow to São Paulo saw the green of the grass and the gold of those shirts as they actually were. The game stopped being rumour and grainy newsreel. It became an image you could fall in love with.

And the image they fell in love with was Brazil. Pelé had walked away from international football after being kicked half to death in 1966, and here he was back, twenty-nine years old and playing as though the previous four years had been spent in some private gymnasium reserved for the blessed. Around him stood a cast that reads now like an altarpiece. Gérson conducting from deep. Tostão drifting between the lines. Rivelino with that left foot. Jairzinho on the right wing like a force of weather. Clodoaldo gliding, and at the back the captain Carlos Alberto, waiting for his moment without knowing it would become the most replayed thirty seconds in the sport's history.

The scripture wrote itself almost daily. In the group stage came Brazil against England, the holders, and the save that refuses to settle any argument it starts. Pelé rose, met a cross, and headed it down and goalward with everything he had, already shouting the word that means a goal in any language. Gordon Banks threw himself across his line and somehow flicked it up and over the bar. More than fifty years later people still cannot fully agree on how a human arm reached that ball. Brazil won that one 1-0 through Jairzinho, but nobody left talking about the result.

Then there was the audacity of a man so certain of himself he tried to score from places nobody else would dream of. Against Czechoslovakia, Pelé spotted the keeper off his line and lobbed him from the halfway line, the ball drifting a yard wide and the entire watching planet exhaling at once. Against Uruguay in the semi final he ran onto a through ball, let it roll deliberately to the wrong side of the goalkeeper, sold the dummy of a lifetime, and then dragged his shot inches past the post. He missed both. They are loved more than most men's goals. That is the kind of forgiveness usually reserved for the divine.

Jairzinho, meanwhile, was quietly assembling a record that will likely stand forever, scoring in every single match of the tournament, the only player ever to manage it.

The final delivered the sermon in full. Brazil and Italy, two of the great football nations, the first time two former champions had ever met to decide it. Pelé opened with a header that hung in the air as though gravity had politely stepped aside. Italy equalised after a rare slack moment in the Brazilian defence, a reminder that finals are not won on poetry alone.

Then the second half arrived and the heavens opened. Gérson thundered one in from distance. Jairzinho bundled his way to the next. And then the benediction. A move that ran through almost the entire team, patient and unhurried, rolled finally into the path of Carlos Alberto arriving at full gallop on the overlap, and the captain struck it so cleanly that the net barely had time to object. 4-1. A third world title in twelve years, and the closest a football team has ever come to being mistaken for a work of art.

Not that the congregation was spared its grief. England, the holders, were the great heartbreak. Banks went down with illness before the quarter final, Peter Bonetti deputised, and a 2-0 lead built by Alan Mullery and Martin Peters dissolved into a 3-2 defeat to West Germany after extra time, Franz Beckenbauer and an Uwe Seeler looping back header dragging the Germans level before Gerd Müller finished the job. Sir Alf Ramsey hauling off Bobby Charlton to save his legs for a semi final England would never reach remains one of the most second guessed decisions in the country's footballing memory.

The Germans then walked straight into their own immortality. Their semi final against Italy, four goals to three after five of the seven were scored in extra time, is known simply as the Game of the Century, with a plaque outside the Azteca to prove it. Beckenbauer played the closing stretch with his arm strapped in a sling and his shoulder dislocated, because his side had already used both of the substitutions the tournament now permitted for the very first time. There is a particular kind of saint who refuses to leave the pitch. He was one.

When it was over, Pelé had his third World Cup, the only man ever to win three, and Brazil were handed permanent possession of the Jules Rimet trophy for being the first to lift it three times. Gerd Müller went home with ten goals and the golden boot, the modern game's quiet furniture of cards and substitutes had been installed almost without anyone noticing, and the world had a new set of saints whose images would hang on bedroom walls for generations who were not even born to watch them.

Every other great side asks to be remembered. The Brazil of 1970 asks to be worshipped, and after fifty-six years nobody has found a good reason to refuse.

Dios del Fútbol is part of the Headers and Volleys Fanzine Network.