Hank Steinbrecher was on a bullet train from Marseille to Paris when he got a call from the White House. “We are going to win this game, aren’t we?” the voice on the other side asked Steinbrecher, then US Soccer Federation’s general secretary. It was 1998. “The news is going around the world.”
Mohammad Khakpour, too, received a call; not from a high-ranking government official but from the family members of those who had lost their children in the war between Iran and Iraq. “Fathers, mothers called and said this game really does matter to us,” the former Iran defender says in the BBC documentary, ‘The Great Game’. “You have to go and win this game for us.”
On paper, it was merely a group-stage match of the World Cup between two teams that had lost their opening matches. But a meeting between two nations who had severed diplomatic relations in 1980 was always going to be much more than a mere game of football.
“Others,” the Iran coach Jalal Talebi says in the documentary, “called it ‘the mother of all games’ and the ‘match of the century’.” Or, ‘the Great Satan’ taking on ‘the Axis of Evil’.
As the United States and Iran prepare to face each other in a winner-takes-all Group B match in Doha on Tuesday (12.30 am, Wednesday, IST), the backdrop won’t be as politically-charged as it was when the two teams met the last time – which was also their first meeting – back in 1998.
The fire, though, has…
