Died Wednesday, at the age of 89, the French striker had registered thirteen goals in 1958, in a single edition of the World Cup. Since this summer that Just Fontaine “was running on the water”, no player has managed to go beyond this record.
by Clément Martel
This is the story of a record that looked like nothing and which has become a myth. Death, Wednesday 1 er March, at the age of 89, Just Fontaine had, by dint of reinterpreting it, made the formula a palimpsest. “Egyptologists find an intact mummy. They observe it and realize that she moves under her strips. They hasten to release her, and when she can speak, she says:” Pardon, but does it Just Fontaine still holds the record for goals scored? “” Did he often have fun.
Since the summer of 1958, in Sweden, the former striker of the French team only occupies the first place in the number of goals scored during a World Cup. From Pelé to Lionel Messi via Ronaldo or Miroslav Klose, generations of scorers have broken their teeth on the thirteen figure, lucky holder for the old Reims stadium icon. “I don’t know if this record will be broken one day,” he said in 2014. But hey, if I can keep it. “He will have won in the grave.
On the outskirts of the summer of 1958, while in France General de Gaulle has just been entrusted with full powers, that Algiers has insurgerated and that generals dream of a coup in Paris , the French football team achieves its first adventure in the World Cup, hoisting itself in third place in a tournament splashed by the talent of its attacker Just Fontaine.
A beautiful course in which not many people believed – starting with the French Football Federation, which only embarks three games of jerseys, one for each of the first round games. If Paris Match titled, the day after the small final, “they made France one of the great football”, the epic of the Blues began in a relative anonymity. Only two hundred supporters and half a dozen journalists hardly convinced had made the trip. At the time, football did not have the aura that surrounds it today, and that summer, France was passionate about the Tour de France, and the confrontation between Raphaël Geminiani, Jacques Anquetil and Charly Gaul.
“A magic duo”
“At the start, the French press gave us no chance, we went there on vacation, recalled Raymond Kopa, in 2017. It seemed, at the time, that we were not very good. “Before going to Sweden, the Blues had no longer won a match for seven months, and the observers remembered that during the 1954 edition, they returned from Switzerland without glory, after an elimination in the first round. “We were told that we arrived the first in Sweden and that we left the first, remembered Roger Piantoni, in 1998. We were injured in our self-esteem.”
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