The most unstoppable footballer since Maradona?
A common, if slightly cringeworthy, observation of pundits in this country is that, if you could marry British will with continental skill, you would have the perfect footballer. Such a mixed recipe was thrillingly in evidence in Diego Maradona. Since then, however, perhaps only Rivaldo has fused the two qualities. Yet when we discuss soccer's AM (After Maradona) greats, Zinedine Zidane invariably comes out on top, with Rivaldo well back among the pack. While it would be dubious to argue that Rivaldo was a better technician than Zidane, it is arguable that, if you took everyone playing at the absolute peak of their game, Rivaldo was the best and most unstoppable footballer since Maradona.
Yet despite his bona fide, bandy-legged genius, he is to some extent forgotten, still ploughing on with the Greek travesty that is the lingering death of a genuinely great career at clubs as irrelevant to the bigger picture as Olympiakos and AEK Athens. It is potentially anomalous to argue that a former World Player of the Year was underrated, yet even at his peak Rivaldo often played under a cloud. He was frequently abused while playing for Brazil, whose fans believed he spared his best for
Barcelona and who had never forgiven him for a crucial mistake in the 1996 Olympics; at club level he inspired both awe and loathing on La Rambla, and his departure on a free transfer in 2002 was mourned by few, even though he had just starred in Brazil's World Cup win.
Apart from a right foot, Rivaldo had everything. His wiry strength allowed him to bounce off defenders, he was a
outstanding dribbler, and he had a left foot that was both educated and thuggish, subtle
and a sledgehammer. He could larrup the ball in, arrow a daisy-cutter a few centimetres inside the far post (the winner against Denmark in the 1998 World Cup quarter-final is the best example, but there were so many), coax a free-kick high or low, left or right, and also pass the ball in (my colleague Mike Adamson pointed out how underrated the precision of his finish
against England in 2002 remains). And his control – best exemplified by a stunning, über-Le Tissier assist against Deportivo in 2002 (after 5.00 of
this video) – was sensational.
Most of all, however, he had
bronca, the word used repeatedly in Diego Maradona's autobiography to refer to "anger, fury, hatred, resentment, bitter discontent ... [it was] his motivator, his fuel, his driving force". Zidane had rage blackouts, but he was rarely in a high state of
bronca: for the most part, as we saw in his movie, he was a wonderfully still footballer, whose game existed in a vacuum of technical perfection, such as the volley in the 2002 Champions League final. But he could not win a game on his own by imposing his personality all over it. Rivaldo could.
Rivaldo often looked apathetic and sullen – his smile was so rare that, when it came, it broke a thousand mirrors, and at times he seemed to dither like a posh boy pretending to have commitment issues – but when the mood took him and he fancied the challenge, he pursued it with the remorseless will and purpose of Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men.
Rob Smyth - Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2008/jun/19/barcelona.brazil
.