A storm had erupted into a tsunami. If there was controversy when Paolo Rossi was put on a plane to Vigo in place of Roberto Pruzzo – the latter was fresh from winning back-to-back Capocannonieri, while the former had made merely three appearances in two seasons due to the Totonero scandal – Italians were going ballistic after the first round of the 1982 FIFA World Cup.
The Pratese had fired three blanks. La Nazionale, who had supposedly been handed an easy group, failed to win a game in it. Somehow, Italy still advanced behind Poland courtesy of scoring two goals to debutants Cameroon’s one.
There was a racket for Enzo Bearzot to abandon his Rossi experiment. Pruzzo may have been in Rome, but Alessandro Altobell was in Barcelona. Surely ‘Needle’ was the man to give them an injection of firepower. The bullheaded boss, however, once again ignored the outcry.
Italy duly eked out a 2-1 victory over Diego Maradona and Argentina, but Rossi failed to ripple the net again. He’d not scored for Italy in over three years and gone, unbelievably, almost 15 hours of action without a goal in Azzurro. The 25-year-old was chastised like no other man in World Cup history. His private life, attitude and marksmanship were all castigated.
“The pressure I was under was volcanic,” said Rossi. “Football is everything to Italians. I was to blame for everything. The press were going wild, attacking me non-stop. I tried to ignore it as best I could, but of course it affects you.”
The night before Italy battled Brazil, Rossi heard a knock on his hotel-room door. When he saw his coach, he accepted his fate. He even appreciated that Bearzot was about to break the news he’d been dropped personally.
Yet art rather than an axe was on Bearzot’s brain. ‘The Old Man’, who incompatibly was only 54, had spent an hour reading up on cubist and surrealist painters. He duly spent 40 minutes discussing Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and the like in an attempt to relax Rossi’s nerves.
It worked. Arguably the most career-shaking performance in World Cup history ensued. Rossi hit a hat-trick – it took another 30 years for Lionel Messi to become the next player to score thrice against Brazil – to KO the overwhelming title favourites and crush their 24-game unbeaten crusade. A double followed against Poland in the semi-finals. Rossi then struck the opener in a 3-1 win over West Germany in the final.
Going into Italy’s fifth game in Spain, Zbigniew Boniek, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and Zico had netted four goals apiece to Rossi’s zero. ‘Pablito’ astonishingly ended up as the tournament’s top scorer.
No other player has taken as many matches to score at a World Cup and gone on to bag its adidas Golden Boot. Its last seven recipients – Davor Suker, Ronaldo, Miroslav Klose, Thomas Muller, James Rodriguez, Harry Kane and Kylian Mbappe – all found the target at the first time of asking.
“My confidence was very low, but Bearzot’s confidence in me wasn’t,” said Rossi. “That was fundamental. I don’t know if any other coach would have kept picking me when a whole nation was on his back, hammering him.
“The first goal against Brazil was the most important one of my career because it gave me back my confidence in every sense of the word. A goal, when it comes, is like manna from heaven for a striker.
“From that moment on it was as if someone up above was looking out for me. Everything suddenly changed. Nothing was going my way and then suddenly everything was going my way. A goal can change everything. In my case it changed my entire life.”
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