World Soccer: The Greatest

First of all - this struck me, when I saw it, as a rather 'un-World Soccer' thing to do. Lists are fun to draw up and stuff, but surely they should be left to mags like FourFourTwo rather than a proper grown-up publication...

Now, my opinion on the selections (because in spite of what I've just said, debating them is fun).

Pictures:
Only a couple of gripes here - first of all where's Pelé clenching his fist, held aloft by Jairzinho after heading in the opener in the 1970 Final? Secondly, the best photo of Maradona from '86 is surely not the 'Hand of God' shot, but the one featuring him on the ball, '10' on his back, with five or six Belgians lined up in front of him looking absolutely bloody terrified. I've never seen any shot that so perfectly encapsulates a player and the effect he had on the opposition even before he'd done anything.

Goals:
I agree with comments above stating that Messi's wondergoal against Getafe possibly wouldn't have featured had it not been so recent. Part of me thinks, they come along so rarely that why not celebrate them when they do? But the 10th greatest of all time? Really?
Argentina's (it seems a little unjust on the rest of the team to call it only Cambiasso's!) against Serbia might be a bit higher (I await the accusations of bias)... but my biggest beef with this bit: ONLY TWO VOLLEYS?! Zidane and van Basten certainly merit their places in the list for those efforts, but volleys are surely the most beautiful way of scoring goals aside from Maradona/Owairan/Messi-like runs through the entire opposing team. Again, I might be biased, because volleys were the only thing I was ever any good at in school playground kickabouts, but still, only two of them in the whole top 20? I'd happily take out most of those ranked 20-11 and replace any of them with Maxi Rodríguez's winner against Mexico last summer, for which he had a defender on his back, controlled a 40-yard crossfield pass on his chest, taking it away from goal, and then smacked it into the top corner with his weaker foot. It might be the most obscene thing I've ever seen televised.

Matches:
I've made my opinions known on the 2005 CL final already, glad to see that Gil at least agrees with me. I'm sure even Righteous, who disagreed so vehemently with me on that other thread, would concede it probably doesn't deserve to be named as the second best match of all time. In the spirit of even-handedness, I'm really not sure our own CL win, in 1999, deserves a place in the top 20 either. Did no-one on the World Soccer staff see the double-header between River Plate and Boca Juniors in the semi-final of the Copa Libertadores in 2004? The second leg of that was absolutely insanely exciting. In fact just about any of River's Libertadores knockout matches (never mind those of the rest of the competing teams!) last year would've been worthier of a place in the list than United v. Bayern - which isn't the same as saying I'd have looked at them in such a list and thought 'oh yes, that game deserves to be there'. But then, looking through, what do we see? The only matches in the top 20 of all time that took place outside Europe, are World Cup games. Even a football-watcher who'd never seen a game played outside this continent would have to suspect there's something just plain incorrect about that. Do none of your contacts in the football magazine world work on publications in Latin America or elsewhere?

Teams:
Again, the major gripe is that there's only one non-European club side on there. Peñarol (as Gil says) and the Independiente who dominated the early years of the Libertadores surely deserve mentions. Pelé's Santos might do as well, if it weren't for that fact that they're inevitably now referred to as Pelé's Santos. And given that you've only written about the top ten, and all World Soccer readers can surely remember the French team of a few years ago, would it have been bending the rules too much to drop them to eleventh and bump La Máquina up to tenth, so that the majority of readers could have read about an all-time great side consisting of players they'd probably never even heard of? It would have made slightly more interesting reading.

Alternative World Top Ten:
Only one name to mention for this one. The top ten as voted for by readers in 1999: Pelé, Maradona, Cruyff, Beckenbauer, Platini, Di Stéfano, Púskas, Best, van Basten, Eusebio. The alternative top ten listed in this issue: Zizinho, Alberto Spencer, Ali Daei, Martin Reim, Claudio Suárez, Hossam Hassan, Obdulio Varela, Elias Figueroa, Duncan Edwards, Mohamed Al-Deayea.
So, given that he wasn't voted in by readers in '99, where is Garrincha in this list? Is my copy missing a double-page spread on him following on from the other ten? Sure, a lot has been written about him in the last few years so World Soccer readers and fans in general today are no doubt more aware of who he was than 8 years ago. But if the purpose of the article was to list the best ten players who weren't named in the 1999 readers' poll (and that's certainly the impression I got, albeit that one or two of the players listed are obviously there due to under-recognition rather than actually being all-time greats), I'd say not including a three-times World Cup winner who's held by many (including your own Lord Glanville, if memory serves me correctly) to have won the 1962 WC single-handedly is a pretty big omission...

Sam

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More fútbol argentino than you can shake a mullet at - Hasta El Gol Siempre

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