On Second Thoughts: Rivaldo

A common, if slightly cringeworthy, observation of pundits in this country is that, if you could marry British will with continental skill, you would have the perfect footballer. Such a mixed recipe was thrillingly in evidence in Diego Maradona. Since then, however, perhaps only Rivaldo has fused the two qualities. Yet when we discuss soccer's AM (After Maradona) greats, Zinedine Zidane invariably comes out on top, with Rivaldo well back among the pack. While it would be dubious to argue that Rivaldo was a better technician than Zidane, it is arguable that, if you took everyone playing at the absolute peak of their game, Rivaldo was the best and most unstoppable footballer since Maradona.

Yet despite his bona fide, bandy-legged genius, he is to some extent forgotten, still ploughing on with the Greek travesty that is the lingering death of a genuinely great career at clubs as irrelevant to the bigger picture as Olympiakos and AEK Athens. It is potentially anomalous to argue that a former World Player of the Year was underrated, yet even at his peak Rivaldo often played under a cloud. He was frequently abused while playing for Brazil, whose fans believed he spared his best for Barcelona and who had never forgiven him for a crucial mistake in the 1996 Olympics; at club level he inspired both awe and loathing on La Rambla, and his departure on a free transfer in 2002 was mourned by few, even though he had just starred in Brazil's World Cup win.

That summer, the Spanish football expert John Carlin wrote that Rivaldo "combines to dazzling effect the two essential qualities of the ideal footballer: artistry and efficiency". The same could not necessarily be said of Zidane. Sir Alex Ferguson once observed that Zidane didn't really "hurt" teams and, while it sounded sacrilegious, there was a degree of truth in it. In terms of ball retention he was probably the greatest player of all time, blessed with such grace and supernatural awareness that he could play a game of real-life Pac-Man and never be caught, but to some extent his work was done in less dangerous areas. He needed good players alongside him.

A team of 11 Zidanes would kill you time and time again, because you'd never get the ball, but a team of 10 Nevilles and a Rivaldo could on occasion do the same. Zidane was an avant-garde footballer, as rich in subtext as it is possible for a sportsman to be, whereas Rivaldo was a rudimentary blockbuster. Yet the suspicion remains that some appreciate Zidane without knowing exactly what they're appreciating; that they are perpetuating a discourse for fear of being seen as a philistine. Nobody wants to admit that they thought Citizen Kane was crap.

The cerebral genius of Zidane, nonetheless, makes him the ultimate fantasy footballer, whereas Rivaldo was the ultimate Fantasy Footballer: he dealt relentlessly in the hard currency of goals (86 in 159 games for Barcelona and 34 in 74 for Brazil, outstanding for a player who invariably played on the left) and assists. And if there were another category by which we judged players - coronaries induced in opposing fans when they get the ball within 30 yards of goal - he would surely be top. When he was on one, he was utterly terrifying.

Apart from a right foot, Rivaldo had everything. His wiry strength allowed him to bounce off defenders, he was a outstanding dribbler, and he had a left foot that was both educated and thuggish, subtle and a sledgehammer. He could larrup the ball in, arrow a daisy-cutter a few centimetres inside the far post (the winner against Denmark in the 1998 World Cup quarter-final is the best example, but there were so many), coax a free-kick high or low, left or right, and also pass the ball in (my colleague Mike Adamson pointed out how underrated the precision of his finish against England in 2002 remains). And his control - best exemplified by a stunning, über-Le Tissier assist against Deportivo in 2002 (after 5.00 of this video) - was sensational.

Most of all, however, he had bronca, the word used repeatedly in Diego Maradona's autobiography to refer to "anger, fury, hatred, resentment, bitter discontent ... [it was] his motivator, his fuel, his driving force". Zidane had rage blackouts, but he was rarely in a high state of bronca: for the most part, as we saw in his movie, he was a wonderfully still footballer, whose game existed in a vacuum of technical perfection, such as the volley in the 2002 Champions League final. But he could not win a game on his own by imposing his personality all over it. Rivaldo could.

Rivaldo often looked apathetic and sullen - his smile was so rare that, when it came, it broke a thousand mirrors, and at times he seemed to dither like a posh boy pretending to have commitment issues - but when the mood took him and he fancied the challenge, he pursued it with the remorseless will and purpose of Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men. "You know how this is gonna turn out, don't you?"

Three examples spring to mind. There was his coconut-shy at an inspired Paul Robinson in a Champions League group game against Leeds in 2000, when Rivaldo finally equalised in the last minute to (temporarily) postpone Barcelona's exit; an astonishing tour de force against Manchester United in 1998 when, in a game Barcelona had to win to avoid elimination, he equalised twice before creaming an unbelievable shot off the bar and ingeniously creating another gilt-edged chance for Giovanni; but best of all there was the greatest hat-trick of all time, against Valencia on June 17, 2001, a midsummer night's dream of a performance that deserves a book, a film and even a Tim Lovejoy tribute all of its own.

In a straight shoot-out for the final Champions League place, which was worth tens of millions and even more in terms of pride, Barcelona needed a win and Valencia a draw. Twice Rivaldo screamed Barcelona ahead from long range, the second hit with such fury that it knocked him off his feet; twice Ruben Baraja equalised. Then, in the 89th minute, he scored with an overhead kick from outside the box so perfectly executed that it even swerved away from the dive of Santiago Canizares. Even now, it beggars belief.

Rivaldo also scored eight goals in two World Cups - including five in consecutive games in 2002 - and two in a Copa America final (in 1999, when he was voted Player of the Tournament). So why is he not in the pantheon? The slow fade of his career does not help: he has been in Greece since 2004 (although he has scored some majestic goals there), and almost ended up at Bolton. Nor does a disastrous 18 months at Milan, during which he was even voted Serie A's worst player. Or the fact that he seemed to be the mardiest of bums.

He doesn't win on longevity, either: for most his peak lasted the five years he was at the Nou Camp, even if he played superbly for three years at Palmeiras and Deportivo before that. And he was rarely involved in the latter stages of the Champions League, but that was mainly the fault of a typical Louis van Gaal defence. Rivaldo was absolutely beyond reproach in the early exits in 1998 and 2000 in particular.

Yet much of the enmity towards him stems from his pitiful cheating at the 2002 World Cup, when he got Turkey's Hakan Unsal sent off. It was shocking stuff - described by Richard Williams in this paper as "an act so despicable that it deserves to rank alongside Toni Schumacher's assault on Patrick Battiston in 1982 and even the Hand of God itself in the tournament's gallery of infamous moments" - but, as Slaven Bilic could tell you in four languages, disgracing oneself in a World Cup match is not a barrier to widespread popularity.

Yet with Rivaldo, the deception seemed to reflect a personality defect so prevalent that one Spanish writer said he had "a kind of autism". He had the hapless air of a noir patsy, and seemed forever hit by ill-fortune. Those two awesome performances against the Uniteds of Leeds and Manchester meant bugger all in the end. When he was enduring the worst time of his life in Milan, his wife Rose left him. If he had a family pet, you just know he'd have reversed over it.

He was essentially clueless: whereas Zidane's headbutt on Marco Materazzi was impossibly cool, Rivaldo's act of World Cup skulduggery was hideously ham-fisted. For that he was reviled as a typical continental (even though, in reality, British players dive as much as anyone), but with the ball at his feet not even the most nationalistic stereotyper would deny that he gave us the best of all worlds.