Inter Milan defender Marco
Materazzi has again spoken of his clash with Zinedine Zidane in the
2006 World Cup final.
Despite Zidane's headbutt and red card, Materazzi has been cast
as the villain.
“Everywhere I go, in every continent, people tell me it was my
fault or even that I was the one to give the headbutt,” said an
incredulous Materazzi on Sky Italia.
“This tells you what a distorted message that public opinion
wanted to send out about what happened. They wanted to make it seem
as if I was the one who made the mistake, forgetting this wasn’t
the first time Zidane headbutted someone. It was maybe the fourth
or fifth.”
The pair were marking each other on a corner and then walking
back to their positions when the incident unfolded.
“If you watch the footage from straight after the corner, I was
almost apologising because I was scared of his potential header,
just as he had 10 minutes earlier with [Gigi] Buffon’s save. When I
made a gesture of apology, he looked at me from head to toe with an
air of superficiality and superiority.
“It irritated me and I replied in a very Italian way. His
response was probably not very French.”
Materazzi had already revealed the verbal exchange between the
two men. Zidane suggested ‘If you want my shirt so badly I can give
it to you after the match,’ to which the defender sniped: ‘I’d
rather get the shirt from your sister.’
This is a classic Italian response to more or less any insult,
the peninsula version of the American ‘Yo mama.’
“Maybe it was my destiny to become more famous for the headbutt
than the goals, but that doesn’t change the fact in the Final I
scored twice and Zidane only once,” smiled the Inter star.
“In that too I feel I beat Zidane, just like Italy beat France.
That was the main objective. If public opinion wants to make it
seem like something it wasn’t, that’s their prerogative, but it
doesn’t change the result on the field.
“The French have that image of Zidane walking past the World
Cup, whereas I put the Italy cap on top of it. I have a giant
blow-up of that image in my house, it’s our symbol of the
tournament.”