The lights had dimmed over the grand arena, the fireworks had long since fizzed out, the triumphalist sounds of Pavarotti and Queen faded away.

In one of the nooks of the Olympic Stadium concourse, barely a few hundred metres from where Fabio Cannavaro had lifted the golden trophy, a group of Frenchmen sat. Disconsolate, despairing, devastated. Berlin, they said, the city that had so often plagued France, had dealt them another cruel blow.

They were wrong. The fatal blow came not from Berlin but from within, from the corner least expected. From Zinedine Zidane, the man revered all over France for showing them they could live their dreams. On Sunday, in one moment of monumental folly, he gave them a nightmare they will take long to wake up from.

It wasn’t supposed to end this way. A career covered in every imagineable glory, personal and with club and country, was ending on the biggest stage of them all. It was a script written by the sporting gods, and the first act followed the lines as Zidane converted a penalty early on, a dinked half-shot that hit the bar and bounced inside the line, making him only the fourth man to score in two World Cup finals. On his last night, yet another landmark.

Then, instead of following the script, Zidane lost the plot. As the match ground inexorably towards penalties, the French captain exacted one of his own. Apparently goaded by Italy’s unsophisticated defender Marco Materazzi, Zidane suddenly turned around and head-butted him.

... contd.