The 6ft 7ins assailant slipped from the handcuffs of an even bigger bodyguard. Peter Crouch craftily sneaked away from Dennis Lawrence and into the cage patrolled by Brent Sancho, whom he dwarfed.
David Beckham glanced north-west and required no second invitation. Drawing on the incomparable whip that inspired the film title Bend It Like Beckham, the England No7 delivered a cross on an aerial dot.
It mattered not that Crouch employed a cheeky dreadlock-drag on his marker – he later apologised and asked to join Sancho at the Trinidadian carnival – before powering a header past Shaka Hislop. The goal stood.
So, too, did Beckham’s place in FIFA World Cup™ history. He had become just the fourth man – after Pele, Grzegorz Lato and Diego Maradona – to register an assist in three editions.
Nobody foresaw that, the following day, an ultimately fruitful crusade to rip up that record would begin.
Lionel Messi hit the mid-noughties like Facebook, skinny jeans, The Big Bang Theory and YouTube.
Diego Maradona championed him as his own heir apparent.
Ronaldinho, after being named the best player on planet blue, declared: ‘I’m not even the best player at Barça”.
‘The Atomic Flea’ hauled elephantine hype into Germany 2006. So, too, had many before him. For every Pele, Diego Maradona or Ronaldo, innumerable wunderkinds had turned washouts.
The undersized, bantamweight, baby-faced 18-year-old was confined to the bench in the curtain-raising defeat of Côte d'Ivoire.
With Argentina coasting to victory over Serbia and Montenegro, though, Jose Pekerman sent him on for his World Cup debut in place of another Rosario native.
Maradona, a spectator in Gelsenkirchen, leapt from his seat and threw his arms in the air wildly as Messi jogged on to replace Maxi Rodriguez in the 75th minute.
It took the newcomer merely three minutes and 37 seconds to register his first World Cup assist.
Messi skinned his man and won a free-kick. Juan Roman Riquelme caught the Europeans by surprise by taking it speedily and threading it into Messi’s path down the left.
The No19 scampered into the opposition box and cut the ball across three opponents to present Hernan Crespo with a back-post tap-in.
Messi also finished the match with his maiden goal in the tournament, but this particular tale is about making rather than taking.
If Argentina’s 2006 campaign had ended in an unfortunate defeat to Germany in the quarter-finals – one inspired by Jens Lehmann’s infamous notes – their loss to the same side at the same stage four years later was crushing.
Messi did nevertheless leave South Africa having set up Carlos Tevez’s deadlock-snapping header against Mexico in the first knockout round.
He was among the assists again at Brazil 2014.
With a penalty shootout just two minutes away against Switzerland in the last 16, Messi left Fabian Schar on his backside, motored through the midfield and slid the ball to Angel Di Maria, whose first-time finish found the bottom corner.
The bracket Pele, Lato, Maradona and Beckham were sharing had been broadened. They would be expelled from it at the next global finals.
Messi, indeed, cooked up two goals against France, gratefully gobbled up by Gabriel Mercado and Di Maria. Two assists in one instalment wouldn’t be his personal best for long.
As well as scoring seven goals at Qatar 2022, Messi laid on another three to inspire Argentina to their first world title in 36 years.
Then, with the Albiceleste’s title defence toppling in ‘The City in the Forest’, Messi set up a Cristiano Romero header and fizzed home a half-volley to inspire an epic fightback against Egypt.
The assist script he’d headlined over 20 years was more fictional than the one starring Keira Knightley and Parminder Nagra in the highest-grossing football film of all time.
Courtesy: FIFA
