These were the days before video assistant referees, before the International Football Association Board had come up with the concept of “unnatural position”, before defenders contorted their bodies so that they ended up looking as if a police officer had manacled their arms behind their backs. At the time, in the eyes of football’s legislators, a handball offence must involve “a deliberate act of a player making contact with the ball with the arm/hand”.
Alas for Portugal, the assistant referee Roland van Nylen had no doubt this is what Abel Xavier had done to block a Sylvain Wiltord cross with his left arm deep in extra time of their Euro 2000 semi-final against France.
The Austrian referee, Günter Benkö, consulted his Belgian linesman and pointed to the spot. Mayhem ensued. A vehement Nuno Gomes was sent off to add to the misery of the Portuguese. Zinedine Zidane struck the penalty hard and true to the right of Vítor Baía. Game over: France had qualified for the final through the golden goal rule, which would be modified by the next European Championship and then abolished.
Three Portugal players, Xavier, Nuno Gomes and Paulo Bento, were suspended from international football due to their conduct for a combined two years by Uefa, which also imposed a fine of 175,000 Swiss francs on the federation.
Twenty-four years on, the scars have yet to heal completely. Xavier will probably maintain until his last breath that, had the roles been reversed and the French left-back, Bixente Lizarazu, had committed a similar offence, a penalty would never have been given.
The golden generation of Rui Costa and Luís Figo had been denied the chance to win the major trophy their talent deserved and would evade them in even crueller fashion on their home soil four years later.
It wasn’t the first time France had shattered Portuguese dreams. In 1984, with six minutes of extra time to play in another Euro semi-final, when Jordão’s second goal of the game appeared to have put Fernando Cabrita’s team through to the final, France came back from the dead to prevail thanks to Jean-François Domergue and, after a magnificent raid by Jean Tigana on the right flank, Michel Platini.
It would not be the last, either. In yet another semi-final, in the 2006 World Cup this time, Zidane scored the only goal, again from the spot, after Ricardo Carvalho had been adjudged to have tripped Thierry Henry, a decision that was met with incredulity by many, and not just in Lisbon. Even the combined presence in the Portugal XI of a returning Figo and of Manchester United’s rising star Cristiano Ronaldo had not been enough to stop a dominant French team.
Portugal would avenge those three defeats when the substitute Eder scored a rare goal (in extra time) to beat France on their home patch in a Euro 2016 final no one expected them to win, especially after Ronaldo sustained an injury and had to leave the field with 25 minutes on the clock.
Bizarrely, despite the controversies, the penalties and the gut-wrenching manner of defeats on the most prestigious stages football can conjure, what should be one of the continent’s greatest rivalries is rarely mentioned in the same breath as, say, England’s or the Netherlands’ tortured relationships with Germany, or even France’s ambiguous love-not-quite-hate affair with Italy.
Perhaps it has to do with the nature of their support. Neither Portugal nor France attract fans whose passion turns sour or violent in the face of perceived injustice. Most of the Portuguese supporters who will show up in Hamburg will be members of the diaspora who have settled in Germany. Just like in 2016, most of those who celebrated Eder’s goal belonged to the 1.2 million-strong community of French residents and citizens who can claim Portuguese heritage.
The first homegrown ultra movement dedicated to the Lusos was created only eight years ago by a Porto fan, and compared with other European countries, very few people travel from Portugal to follow their own in international tournaments.
This unique characteristic has a paradoxical effect on the attitude of Portuguese fans when it comes to France. On one hand, some – a minority – will feel torn between love for their ancestral land and the attachment they feel towards the country they grew up in. On the other, most will see football as a means to put back in their place those French people who fail to understand how stereotypical their positive characterisation of Portuguese immigrants – as warm, kind, hard-working and well-integrated people – can be.
This condescension grates with many; but this is not hatred either. It is far more complicated than that, as are almost all things when it comes to France’s neurotic attitude towards immigration.
For the journalist Nicolas Vilas, whose parents left Portugal to build a new life in France in the late 1960s, this rancorous yet not unfriendly relationship is also fed by a longstanding inferiority complex towards the French, at least in football, which can manifest itself in unexpected ways.
“It should tell you something,” he says, “that one of the most detested people in Portugal, even today, is the French referee Marc Batta, who gave Costa a second yellow card for time-wasting as he was about to be subbed in a 1998 World Cup qualifier against Germany.
“We were 1-0 up. The Germans, playing 11 v 10, equalised. And because of that, because of a Frenchman, we didn’t go to the Mondial. Had we not been considered a small nation then, for most fans, this would not have happened.”
The events in 2016 changed that frame of mind, but only to an extent. As usual, whatever happens, there will be no displays of acrimony, no confrontations inside or outside the stadium; but the ambivalence will remain, unnoticed by the rest of the watching world.
