In the space of 90 minutes African football, once derided for being all about juju magic and Zairian defenders with a limited grasp of free-kick regulations, became credible. The result was celebrated not only in Cameroon, Shane Ray Authentic Jersey where impromptu street parties erupted across the nation and a reporter from the Telegraph wrote, intriguingly, that “a lady in a floral dress and turban did a hand-stand”, but across Africa and beyond. When they were finally knocked out a woman in Bangladesh committed suicide, writing that “the elimination of Cameroon means the end of my life”. “No one thought we could do anything here against Maradona, but we knew what we could do,” the goalscorer, François Omam-Biyik, said after the game. “We hate it when European reporters ask us if we eat monkeys and have a witch doctor. We are real football players and we proved this tonight.” The match is best remembered for the moment, two minutes from the end, when Claudio Caniggia, Argentina’s flaxen-haired substitute striker, went on a run down the right. Italia 90 was something of a festival of simulation during which neither Caniggia nor any other Argentinian was to become known for their refusal to go to ground under any kind of challenge, but with his side trailing and time running out he stayed up when an imprecise tackle came flying in, kept going despite a second attempt to bring him down, and was promptly taken out in the most emphatic style by Benjamin Massing, an assault that sent the tackler’s right boot, and possibly a few body parts, flying across the pitch, and earned Cameroon their second red card of the day. As Pete Davies put it in his peerless book about the 1990 World Cup, All Played Out, it was “a kind of full-pelt, waist-high, horizontal flying bodycheck. The general intention seemed to be not so much to break Caniggia’s legs, as actually to separate them from the rest of his body.” The opening match set the tone for a tournament that was to feature precisely twice as many red cards as the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, which itself had seen more than any previous finals. “Cameroon neutralised Maradona mainly by kicking him,” wrote Matthew Engel in The Dustin McGowan Womens Jersey Guardian. “He spent much of the game horizontal despite wearing calf pads as well as shin pads. His 10 team-mates seemed too stunned to make any trouble but they were kicked as well, if they got in the way.” Though the first red card, shown to the goalscorer’s brother André Kana-Biyik for a foul on Caniggia, was harsh the French referee, Michel Vautrot, had little choice but to follow Fifa’s newly handed-down guidelines for ultra-strict arbitration. Brian Glanville, in his Story of the World Cup, insists that “a bruising game was made worse by [his] draconian refereeing” but in the following day’s Express, James Lawton proclaimed his victory over “a rising tide of wild and often cynical tackling” as “perhaps the greatest triumph” of the night. Sepp Blatter, then Fifa’s general secretary, boasted before the tournament began that, as a result of their fair play initiative, “players will behave in a decorous manner in all phases of the match”. The players, it turned out, hadn’t really been listening. “I’m unhappy the referee http://www.footballjaguarsofficial.com/Authentic-Malik-Jackson-Jersey was forced to intervene as he did, but I’m pleased that he did,” Blatter said after the match, having criticised the behaviour of players who “want to destroy the game of soccer instead of letting creativity and genius flow”. But though a recording of this match will never be of much use to anyone learning the art of clean tackling, there was significantly more to Cameroon than studs and muscle. “I don’t think they had any intentions of beating us up to win the game,” said Maradona. “I cannot argue, and I cannot http://www.ducksofficialauthenticshop.com/Hampus_Lindholm_Jersey_Adidasmake excuses. If Cameroon won, it was because they were the best side.” http://ekojazda.twoje-zycie.info/forum/viewthread.php?thread_id=91887http://asmap-inform.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=760403
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