My favourite game: Italy v Brazil, 1982 World Cup

Socrates scores a goal … That sums up the philosophy of Brazilian football!” Even during John Motson’s mid-80s pomp, I was always more of a Barry Davies man. The yodelling tone, the semi-scripted big lines. It always seemed a bit much w88 line .

Even that stone cold Motson classic, “the Crazy Gang have beaten the Culture Club”, was basically quite weird, an unexplained zigzag into sexually androgynous New Romantic cod-reggae in the moment of Wimbledon’s FA Cup final triumph. “The Crazy Gang have beaten the Rat Pack.” That might have been better, but only if we really must have an underdog 1950s British comedy troupe riff at this point.



But Motson on Brazil was always brilliant. He was there at all the big World Cup moments. Each time you felt he really did love Brazilian football, that the oddly sensuous, flushed round of gurgles and squawks came from a genuine place w88 casino

Spain 1982 was the last really captivating version of those pre-modernity, pre-Nike Brazil teams. Defeat to Italy was epic-scale and oddly heartbreaking. Mainly though, it looks now like the end of something.

 Brazil’s Zico turns on the skill to get the better of Italy’s Claudio Gentile. Photograph: Colorsport/Shutterstock
Not that anyone really got that at the time. The game was an instant, indelible classic. It had two of the best World Cup teams in two of the best World Cup kits. It had Motson on the BBC in prime full-warble mode. It had the best scoreline, 3-2, lodged perfectly in between overly chaotic goal-madness and just enough goal-madness.

And it had something beautiful too, Brazil’s team of all the No 10s broken like a butterfly on a wheel by the gristlier, more industrial football of Italy’s champions-in-waiting  .

Telê Santana’s team had won their three First Group Stage games by an aggregate of 10-2. For this game they had a dream midfield of Cerezo-Falcão, with Sócrates and Eder ahead of them, plus Zico, the perfect No 10, just off the front man. Who was, as it happened, a bludgeon in a team of scalpels. “When Serginho plays, the ball is square,” one Brazilian journalist wrote.

By contrast, Italy had Paolo Rossi, recently returned from a match-fixing ban and a ghost in his three goalless World Cup games to that point. But he opened the scoring after five minutes in Barcelona with a header from a fine cross by Antonio Cabrini. The defending was terrible. But Brazil were level seven minutes later through a piece of fantasy on the righ https://www.w88thais.com/football-betting-online/ .