By Camille Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 10, 2006; A01
BERLIN, July 9 -- After 31 days and 64 matches, the championship of the world's most popular sports event came down to one moment on Sunday night in Olympic Stadium: Italy's Fabio Grosso facing French goalkeeper Fabien Barthez, 12 yards of grass separating the ball and the goal, and the simplest of outcomes resting on a shot.
If Grosso could score, Italy would win the World Cup.
Both players had performed under pressure in the past. Barthez had became a national icon after helping France win the 1998 World Cup. Grosso, meantime, seemed to be heading for similar status at home if he could make this kick and play the decisive role in an Italian victory for a third time in this tournament.
Grosso connected with his left foot and sent the ball flying to the upper right corner of the goal. Barthez -- with only a split-second to commit -- guessed the ball would go the other way. The ball rocketed into the back of the net, Barthez watched over his shoulder as he fell to the turf, and a crowd of 69,000 let loose a roar. Vittoria! No victoire . Italy won on penalty kicks, 5-3, after a 1-1 game.
Grosso dashed from one side of the field to the other, with the rest of his teammates following in happy pursuit. The manic and joyous celebration, in which tough-guy midfielder Gennaro Gattuso somehow ended up without shorts and without shoes, was catharsis for them. Italy, beset by a soccer corruption scandal at home, claimed the World Cup for the fourth time overall and the first in 24 years.
"The players have unlimited heart, character, and personality," said Marcello Lippi, the Italian coach.
The French players could only sit and watch, except for midfielder Zinedine Zidane. The man who is considered to be the greatest player of his generation was in the locker room, his celebrated career having come to a disgraceful end with a late red-card ejection.
The sellout crowd included United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and former president Bill Clinton. An estimated 1 billion people in 207 countries were expected to follow it on television, making it the world's most-watched sporting event.
A month ago, neither Italy nor France seemed likely candidates to win the World Cup. The French were too old and the Italians would be done in by a difficult first-round schedule and the match-fixing scandal, many observers said. Host Germany, Argentina and Brazil were safer bets.
But Italy and France were here, and they started quickly Sunday, with France scoring on Zidane's penalty kick in the seventh minute. Italy tied the game 12 minutes later on Marco Materazzi's header.
From there, the game was largely forgettable, outside of Zidane's ejection in the second 15-minute period of extra time. Zidane, 34, who had announced he would retire from the sport after this World Cup, slammed his head into the chest of Materazzi as the two players walked down the field. Argentine referee Horacio Elizondo, after consulting sideline officials who saw a video replay, showed the French captain a red card. Zidane walked off the field, past the gold winner's trophy, and headed into retirement.
"It's a shame," said French Coach Raymond Domenech, who added that he did not see the foul when it happened. "It's sad. I prefer if he would go out in another way."
With the score still tied at 1 after 120 minutes, penalty kicks were used to decide the winner. Italy converted five to France's three; Grosso slammed in the decisive kick. Earlier in the tournament, Grosso had helped Italy advance first by drawing a controversial foul that gave Italy a 1-0 win over Australia, then by scoring the game-winner with three minutes left in overtime against Germany in last week's semifinals.
The Italians, who have long been one of soccer's powerhouses, came to Germany under a cloud. A month before the tournament began, Italy's premier domestic league, known as Serie A, was rocked by allegations of match-fixing against four of its top clubs. Thirteen of the Italian national team's members, more than half the roster, play for one of the teams (Juventus, AC Milan, Fiorentina and Lazio) involved in the scandal. Then, shortly before Italy was set to face Ukraine in the quarterfinals, Juventus General Manager Gianluca Pessotto, a friend to several of the current players, fell from his office roof with rosary beads in his hand and was hospitalized in critical condition.
"The belief grows as the matches grow," said Lippi, whose team's only blemish was an ugly tie against the United States in the first round.
Back in Italy, where the population takes the sport it calls calcio quite seriously, the victory was met with jubilation from Naples to Rome to Milan. Fans expressed their joy with car horns and chants, flags and fireworks.
Meantime, exuberant street parties in France, which was temporarily propelled out of its national malaise by the World Cup finals, collapsed in the final seconds of the game.
"I'm crying inside," said Sam Pancaldi, a 32-year-old lawyer who joined more than 200 people spilling into the street from the Cafe au Dernier Metro in Paris. "No World Cup, no party. I just want to go to sleep."
The final game transfixed the nation, giving it a momentary release from a year of riots in its immigrant suburbs, student demonstrations in its urban centers and a recent spate of political and business scandals. The multiracial team also lifted the spirits of minorities in a country where race has been a tension point.
In Germany, the tournament slogan was "A time to make friends," and if the play on the field didn't exactly live up to it -- a total of 373 cards (345 yellow cards, or cautions, and 28 reds, which result in automatic ejections) were issued for infractions ranging from overly physical challenges to unsportsmanlike play -- the atmosphere around the games certainly did.
The 12 host cities, ranging from the small (Kaiserslautern, population of 99,000) to the big (Berlin, 3.3 million), created "Fan Fest" areas where supporters who didn't obtain game tickets could watch games televised on giant screens and drink beer. The city of Frankfurt placed its enormous television screens in the middle of the River Main, and thousands of fans lined both banks; a reported one million people watched the quarterfinal between Germany and Argentina at Berlin's Fan Mile, which began at the Brandenburg Gate and stretched into the Tiergarten.
The World Cup reached more Americans than ever, with ABC and ESPN reporting record ratings for soccer (although the numbers still do not approach those of baseball, basketball or football). Many point to increases in immigration in recent years as a factor in soccer's growing popularity in the United States. The U.S. team's performance did not help, as the Americans failed to advance past the first round. Despite uninspired play, the U.S. team could say this after Sunday -- its high point was tying the eventual champion, 1-1 on June 17.
In Washington on Sunday, interest in the final match reflected this trend. At a social hall adjacent to the Holy Rosary Roman Catholic Church in Northwest, more than 100 Italian Americans gathered to watch the game. They ate pasta and said their prayers when things got tight at the end.
"All Italians are playing with them," said Monsignor Claudio Cricini of the Vatican Embassy in Washington.
Nearby, at Les Halles, a popular French restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue, a mix of 100 French, Serb and Japanese people gathered to watch the game and shouted " Allez Les Bleus " practically every time a Frenchman touched the ball. At the end of the game, Nicolas Legret, a chef, was a bit despondent and draped a French flag over the restaurant's big screen television, triggering the place, even in grief, to roar with glee one last time.
This World Cup was also notable for things that didn't happen. The two major pre-tournament concerns, hooliganism and racially motivated violence, turned out to be largely unfounded, outside of a handful of instances.
Polish and German fans clashed when their teams met in Dortmund in the first round, though not to the extent that many feared, and German and English fans were involved in a melee in Stuttgart, an alcohol-fueled incident that involved thrown chairs and resulted in 300 arrests. Domenech, the French coach, claimed that the black players on his team were taunted with monkey chants as their bus approached Hanover's AWD Arena for a quarterfinal against Spain.
But all of that was overshadowed by a stirring performance from the home team and host country. Germans, who were so pessimistic about their team's potential prior to the tournament, embraced the Mannschaft , as the national team is known, as the games wore on and the team kept winning. The national flag began popping up everywhere, from apartment windows and construction cranes and cars. People burst into chants of "Deutschland" and "Lukas Podolski" -- the name of one of the team's forwards, who was named the tournament's outstanding young player -- while standing in subway cars.
Germany lost to Italy, 2-0, in the semifinals -- the best game of the tournament -- but that did little to damper to party atmosphere. Germany's 3-1 victory over Portugal in the third-place match on Saturday night set off celebrations in Berlin, with honking car horns and fireworks. The players awoke to newspapers proclaiming "You are our world champions" and "The world champion of our hearts." An estimated 500,000 fans greeted the team -- whose members were wearing shirts with "Danke Deutschland" written across the front -- at the Berlin Fan Mile on Sunday afternoon.
And that was just a prelude to the celebration inside of Olympic Stadium. The Italians ran joyfully around the field, pausing in front of their delirious fans to bounce up and down, pumping their hands in the air. Meantime, the French, who were champions in 1998, sat quietly on the grass; some players cried.
Zidane did not join his teammates as they somberly walked across the stage to accept their runner-up medals. Gattuso was handed a pair of blue shorts, in a darker shade than the Azzurri's classic blue, so he was fully dressed when he received his medal. Fabio Cannavaro, the Italian team captain, planted a kiss on the trophy, and the celebration began anew.
Foreign correspondent Molly Moore contributed to this report from Paris, special correspondent Sarah Delaney contributed from Rome and staff reporters Dan Morse and Ian Shapira contributed from Washington.