Diana Ross, Duckens Nazon and a dog called Pickles — vintage World Cup trivia

With the quadrennial obsession with global football upon us, savour these tasty titbits from 96 years of Fifa World Cup history.

15 Jun

Singer Diana Ross performs during the Opening Ceremony of World Cup ’94 at Chicago’s Soldier Field. (Photo: Reuters / Reinhard Krause)

In spite of 48 nations qualifying for these finals, most of the world’s population is not represented because five of the six most populous nations on earth – India, China, Indonesia, Pakistan and Nigeria with a combined population of 3.2-billion – all failed to qualify.
India did qualify for the World Cup finals once, in 1950. Legend has it that they refused to travel to Brazil because Fifa ordered their players to wear boots, when they normally played barefoot. Sadly, that isn’t true. India actually bailed on financial grounds and because they preferred to focus on the Olympic football which was seen as more prestigious at the time.
At the other end of the scale, the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao has become the smallest nation ever to qualify for the finals with a population of 185,487 (less than that of Roodepoort). Curaçao are managed by Dutchman Dick Advocaat who, at 78, is the oldest person to coach at World Cup finals. They lost their opening game 7-1 to four-time world champions Germany on Sunday.

Curaçao is where neighbouring Haiti played its home games en route to qualification thanks to goals from its wonderfully named star, Duckens Nazon. Haiti is so strife-torn that it cannot host any fixtures. Haiti were also at the 1974 finals where they lost all three group games including a 7-0 thrashing by Poland. They went down 1-0 to Scotland in their opening game in Boston.

New Zealand have qualified for the third time, out of the ridiculously easy Oceania group beating the might of New Caledonia – population 292,000 – in the decisive game… which they played at Eden Park (where Kiwis never lose anything) just to make sure.
Four-time winner Italy failed to qualify yet again. The Azzurri have not won a knockout game in the finals since 2006 when they won the title.
The pick of the team nicknames from this year’s finals are: Australia’s Socceroos, Uzbekistan’s White Wolves, Cape Verde’s Blue Sharks and Jordan’s An-Nashama which translates as The Chivalrous Ones. Sadly, The Happy Yemen (from Yemen) and The Parrots from Dominica did not make it.
Former Bafana Bafana coach Carlos Queiroz is managing at his fifth consecutive world cup finals – Portugal in 2010; Iran in 2014, 2018, 2022; and Ghana this year. The Portuguese, in his time, has also managed Colombia, Egypt, Qatar, Oman and UAE.

At the first tournament in 1930 in Uruguay: in the final Argentina provided the ball for the first half and the Uruguayans for the second half; the Romanian and Bolivian coaches both doubled up as referees; and the Romanian team was personally selected by that country’s reigning King Carol.
In Brazil 1950, the star-studded English (Stan Mortensen, Billy Wright, Tom Finney, Alf Ramsay et al) turned up for the first time, having previously considered the event as beneath them, and proceeded to lose 1-0 to the US. The shocking defeat wasn’t widely covered in England because the first-ever Test cricket loss to the West Indies dominated the sports pages at the time. Only one American journalist covered the game – he paid his own way to be there and described the result “as if Oxford University sent a baseball team to the USA and it beat the Yankees”.
The original World Cup trophy was stolen… twice. Prior to the 1966 tournament in England, the gold Jules Rimet Trophy was stolen while on display in Westminster City Hall, and then found wrapped in newspaper under a bush in south-east London by a dog called Pickles. The dog appeared on TV and in a movie and his collar can be found in Manchester’s National Football Museum. Brazil was awarded the Rimet trophy in perpetuity when it won a third title in 1970, but the trophy was stolen from the national football headquarters in Rio in 1983 and, even though several culprits were arrested, it has never been recovered.

Aside from Pickles and England’s final hat-trick hero Geoff Hurst, the most famous character from the 1966 tournament was “the Russian linesman” who entered into football folklore when he controversially decreed that one of Geoff Hurst’s goals in the final had crossed the line. The beaten Germans have been bitter about him ever since. Ironically, he wasn’t Russian at all. Tofiq Bahramov was from Azerbaijan, which was then part of the Soviet Union, and became the first match official to ever have a major arena named after him when the Lenin Stadium in Baku was renamed the Bahramov Republican Stadium.
El Salvador reached the finals in 1970 after beating Honduras in a disputed play-off match that was the catalyst for a four-day military conflict known as “The Football War”.
In 1978, in the Argentinian city of Mar del Plata, France played a game against Hungary in local club Atlético Kimberley’s green-striped kit when both teams turned up with white strips.
The politics of football have always stunk. Veteran American diplomat Henry Kissinger was part of a US bid to host the 1986 finals when Colombia belatedly pulled out. After what seemed like a rigged process resulted in Mexico getting the nod, Kissinger remarked that “football politics made him nostalgic for the politics of the Middle East”.

The most infamous penalty misses at World Cup finals have come from Italy’s Roberto Baggio (1994), England’s Harry Kane (2022) and Chris Waddle (1990), Ghana’s Asamoah Gyan (2010) and… Diana Ross. During the opening ceremony of the 1994 World Cup in Chicago, the superstar singer was meant to score a penalty at the beginning of her performance, with the goal then splitting in two, but Ross missed to the left. DM

DM is much better if you are signed in...