The Football Tragic

Hristo Bonev's missed penalty in Sofia provides us with one of football's more intriguing counter-factuals. If he had scored, if Bulgaria had won 3-2, if the French had suffered another devastating qualifying defeat thanks to a dubious decision by the referee, would the French have qualified for the 1978 World Cup? And if not, would the great French revival of the 1980s have happened?

It would have been a very tough ask to qualify after an initial defeat. As well as the Bulgarians, the qualifying group in question contained a strong Republic of Ireland side which featured such players as Liam Brady, Steve Heighway, Frank Stapleton and a young David O'Leary. The Irish, indeed, beat the French in Dublin later in the qualifying series, which obliged Les Bleus to win their final game at home, against...Bulgaria. Which they duly did, with Michel Platini again to the fore.

Apart from reaching their first World Cup tournament in 12 years, there were two long-term consequences of the result in Sofia, in my view. The first is that Michel Hidalgo did not feel obliged, as might have happened in the wake of a defeat, to restrain the open, attacking football which became a French trademark in the years to come. At the 1978 World Cup, although the French failed to progress from an exceptionally tough first-round group, they impressed most neutrals with their football and were very unlucky to go down 2-1 to the eventual champions Argentina in one of the most exciting games of the event.

The second is that Hidalgo kept faith with the youngsters who had gained the result in Sofia, and these youngsters were to form the core of the team that became the world-renowned French side of the mid-80s. In Sofia, Marius Trésor was the only outfield survivor from the final match of the miserable 1976 Nations Cup campaign, but in their crucial match of the next World Cup qualifying series, a do-or-die clash with the Netherlands in Paris, seven of those who took the field in Sofia were starting once more - five years down the track, in 1981. And it would have been eight had Dominique Rocheteau been fit to start in 1976.

That match against Holland showed a different side of Les Bleus. Once again, the French had landed in a very difficult qualifying group, featuring not only the Netherlands, runners-up in the previous two World Cups, but Belgium, finalists in the previous Nations Cup, and the Irish once again. By the time of the Holland match, the French could only hope to qualify with a win, and this time the team creaked badly in the first half, barely creating a single chance. 

But by this time the French side had learned to "win hard" as well. When Platini broke the deadlock early in the second half - inevitably, from a free kick - the team gradually assumed control. But something else was noticeable: when the Dutch launched a final series of assaults on the French goal, Hidalgo's men showed some "game smarts" which had been quite absent in Sofia. They slowed the tempo, they took their time over goalkicks and free kicks; they acted, in fact, like the experienced unit they now were. It was a game which presaged, in many ways, their less-than-sparkling win over Spain in the final of the Nations Cup they won so impressively otherwise in 1984.

As for the Bulgarians, their fortunes dipped after Bonev's missed penalty. By contrast with the French, their team underwent many changes in the years to come; in their own crucial qualifier of the 1982 World Cup series, a home tie with Austria, there were only two outfield survivors of Sofia, and the team was held to a 0-0 draw, ensuring their elimination. It was only in 1986 that they returned to the World Cup, and it was an unimpressive showing.

There was to be a further twist in the tale many years later, when a stunning home defeat to Bulgaria eliminated a talented young French side from the 1994 World Cup in the United States. At that tournament, the Bulgarians were to surprise everyone by reaching the semi-finals, inspired by another free-kick maestro in the mould of Bonev - a certain Hristo Stoichkov.

But that's another story.

# posted by Mike Salter @ 10:05 AM