With the whole world watching on the biggest stage imaginable,
Zinedine Zidane, plain and simple, lost it.
By Jimmy Durkin
With the whole world watching on the biggest stage imaginable, Zinedine Zidane, plain and simple, lost it.
With his entire country counting on him to be the man to deliver the World Cup championship to France, Zidane had a moment of stupidity.
His violent headbutt of Marco Materazzi during overtime of Sunday’s World Cup final drew a red card, leaving France without its best player at the most important time. While the referees have taken their share of heat throughout this World Cup, there was no controversy surrounding this call.
Referee Horacio Elizondo had no choice to toss Zidane.
It’s hard to fully predict the impact of Zidane’s dismissal. But given the fact he had scored France’s lone goal on a penalty kick in the seventh minute and that the game ended up going to a shoot-out, I can bet the French would have loved to have seen him out there.
For fans in our non-soccer country of the United States, it may be a little difficult to see how big of a boneheaded move this was. Sure, we can listen to the soccer analysts on ESPN for the next day or so, those same analysts that we now won’t see again for four years until the next World Cup begins.
But for the purpose of comparison, imagine this: It’s the bottom of the ninth in Game 7 of the World Series. The San Francisco Giants are at home tied 4-4 with the New York Yankees. The bases are loaded with two outs and Barry Bonds steps up to the plate. He takes a first pitch strike on the inside corner and doesn’t like the call. He turns around, gets in the umpire’s face, yells, streams, bumps the umpire with his chest and is ejected.
Then Jason Ellison has to enter as a pinch-hitter, he strikes out and the inning ends. In the 10th inning, the Yankees come up, score a run, the Giants fail to tie it in the bottom of the inning and New York takes the world championship.
Just think about the headlines the next day. Everything Bonds’ has done for his whole career (we’ll say, for argument’s sake, that we’re only thinking about his on-field stuff), is completely wiped out because of one moment of complete insanity on the field.
That’s what it’s like now for Zidane, a man who has once hoisted a World Cup trophy for his country, but now will live with the embarrassment and shame of helping deny France another title.
In the heat of battle, everyone has their moments of poor decision.
I’ve been in several circumstances during competition where I’ve been absolutely floored by a call made by an official.
Once, during the final game of my high school baseball career, I fielded a throw at third base that beat the attempted base stealer by at least five feet and I tagged him out, only to have the umpire call him safe.
I nearly lost it. Here I was, playing in my final game against the first-place team, and the game was still close enough that our team felt we had a chance to win and the umpire made a terrible call.
I turned and was about two seconds from going off on the umpire, but then thought of how I would feel knowing for the rest of my life that I was ejected from my final game. I would lose out on two more at-bats.
So when my mouth opened up to begin an argument, I instead inserted my glove into my mouth and bit down on it. It proved to be a way to show my frustrations to the umpire, but at the same time not do anything that would jeopardize my being able to continue playing.
I finished up playing that game, collected my final hit in my next at-bat and, despite the loss, felt a little bit better about how the game ended.
Granted, this was on a much smaller stage, but the idea is similar. Any athlete, whether playing at an elite level in front of thousands of fans in a big stadium or in front of 50 fans at a beat-up ballpark, needs to know when to control him or herself.
Zidane has now joined the list of people who forgot that and it’s something he’ll always be remembered for and even worse, it’s something that will haunt him forever.
