Like the best stories, the biggest adventures and football itself, this begins in a pub. In 2005 the journalist Javier Cáceres flew from Berlin to Santiago to interview Leonel Sánchez in a bar called Munich where the former international had his own stein with his name on. Sánchez, the son of a boxer, joint-top scorer at the 1962 World Cup, was one of Chile’s greatest players and among the hardest too. Once leader of the team they named the Blue Ballet, what he did that day over a beer would, two decades on and purely by chance, bring together footballers from around the world in a unique collection of art.
In the Battle of Santiago, between Chile and Italy – memorably introduced by David Coleman as “the most stupid, appalling, disgusting and disgraceful exhibition of football, possibly in the history of the game” – it was Sánchez who broke Humberto Maschio’s nose and hit Mario David. But he then scored in Chile’s quarter-final against the Soviet Union, the radio commentator Julio Martínez embedding it in the collective conscience with shouts of “Divine justice!” Of Sánchez’s 260 goals, beating Lev Yashin meant the most. Yet as he described that moment, Cáceres couldn’t picture it. So he handed Sánchez a pen and asked him to draw it.
