PELÉ THE CONQUEROR

Many thousands have enjoyed Ronnie Whelan’s spectacular volleyed goal against the USSR in Euro 88, but this latest admirer of that wonder-strike is no ordinary fan.

Watching it being replayed on a video screen in a room high up in Bank of Ireland’s Dublin headquarters, he purses his lips in admiration as the ball sails into the top corner of the net before turning to speak in animated approval to his companion. The language may be Portuguese but the message is clear enough.

Hey, Ronnie Whelan – Pelé liked your goal!

How best to express the weight of this seal of approval to the uninitiated? I suppose that it might be akin to a parish priest receiving a visit from a gentleman with a long, flowing beard who says he’s God and wants to congratulate him on his sermon. The difference being, of course, that Edson Arantes do Nascimento is a divine being who actually exists though how he scored some of those goals remains, admittedly, a mystery with a capital M.

George Best, one of just a handful of players who merit mention in the same breath as Pelé, once made an astute distinction between two different types of strikers. On the one hand, there are great goal-scorers, he observed, and on the other, there are scorers of great goals. A measure of Pelé’s football genius is that he obliterated that distinction like no-one else before or since.

Hell, even the ones that got away were great. In the 1970 World Cup, the tournament that marked Pelé’s apotheosis, he dazzled millions with the boldness of his ambition. Whether lobbing the Czech keeper from the halfway line or baffling his Uruguyan counterpart with an audacious high-speed dummy, Pelé seemed intent on scoring nothing less than The Greatest Goal Of All Time. As it happened, neither of those outrageous efforts came off, but no-one who saw them will ever forget them. Thus, another measure of Pelé’s unmatched brilliance: his Greatest Misses are as memorable as his Greatest Hits. The man himself laughs at the irony. “I scored four goals in the World Cup in Mexico,’’ he says, “and all anyone ever wants to talk about are the ones I missed.’’

Well, that and a whole lot more. Ostensibly, Pelé was in town to support a Mastercard promotion for next Summer’s World Cup, but it wasn’t long before he was being buttonholed for his opinions on football then and now – and as someone whose playing career spanned four World Cups, he is more qualified than most to pass judgment.

With that blinding originality for which I’m universally ac-claimed, I set the ball rolling by asking a question which the Black Pearl has probably only been asked about 10,000 times before. Just who IS the greatest player of them all? He flashes a beguiling smile and says: “You mean apart from Pelé?’’. Which, of course, is exactly what I mean.

“It is not enough to compare a player’s performance in one tournament with another,’’ he continues, “you must look at them over many years as well as on and off the pitch. I think Beckenbauer was excellent on and off the pitch; so was Bobby Charlton. I think that is how it should be judged.’’

Which, put another way, rather suggests that Maradona’s tendency to hug white lines other than those bordering the field of play, renders him a suspect candidate in the eyes of Pelé. Clean-nosed ambassadors of the game are definitely more his style.

“Now, to talk about Pelé,” he continues, warming to his theme. “There have been a lot of musicians, but only one Beethoven; there have been a lot of artists, but only one Michelangelo; and there have been a lot of singers but only one Frank Sinatra. So, in football, you have only one Pelé – that is the reality.”

Now, coming from just about any other being on the planet – with the possible exception of Muhammed Ali – such a statement would amount to a breathtakingly monstrous display of arrogance. But coming from the mouth of El Rei it is, of course, nothing more than the plain, unvarnished truth. Mind you, it helps that Pelé’s disarming smile is ever-present as he speaks these words – and at its broadest when he draws you into his confidence with an additional piece of information.

“I must tell you one other thing,” he says with a chuckle. “I am sure that never will there be another Pelé. I am sure. Because my Mama and my Papa” – and here he mimes a scissors with his fingers – “they have closed the machine.” And his infectious laughter booms around the room.

Incidentally, we are unlikely to see son of Pelé following in his father’s footsteps – even though one of his children is already playing for Santos and his father fully expects to see him debut for Brazil in the near future. But if he does so, it’ll be between the posts for, wisely, this son of the world’s greatest player has opted to be a goalkeeper.

It’s a sad fact of modern football that Brazil, three-times winners of the World Cup and the traditional custodians of the beautiful game, have failed to lift the ultimate prize since that stellar team of Pelé, Gerson, Tostao, Rivelino and Jairzinho destroyed Italy by four goals to one in the Azteca Stadium, Mexico all of 23 years ago. Pelé argues that his home country’s efforts since then have to a large extent fallen victim to a lack of continuity in the planning stages. By way of example, he cites the present team’s troubled qualification campaign for the forthcoming World Cup.

“Brazil has had three different tournaments in the last six months – the U.S. Cup, the Copa America and the World Cup qualifiers – and in them we have used three different teams. And the problems that caused were clear to everyone in the World Cup campaign when we lost a qualifier for the first time ever and came close to going out.

“The team in 1970 played together for almost three years with virtually no change and as a result that was a very solid, experienced side – as well as one that had some very talented individual players. But since then, we have not won the World Cup, although the team that played in Spain in 1982 was a fantastic team in my opinion. But after that it was back to the old problem of not being able to keep a team together, mainly because many players went to Europe.

“If I was the coach of Brazil, I would have only Brazilian-based players in my squad between now and the World Cup, except for a couple of others like Romario and Bebeto who could return from Spain to join the training camp a little before the tournament. That way, you would have the basis of a good team. There is too much dependence on the European-based players even though we have enough talent at home.

“For example, Sao Paulo are the best club side in South America at the moment – with all of them, plus Romario and Bebeto, we would have an excellent team in the World Cup Finals. As it is, I think Columbia will be the best South American team in the States. They are a very good side.”

However things pan out, it’s clear that Pelé reckons Romario is crucial to the Brazilian cause, as anyone who has seen him score a sequence of remarkable goals for Barcelona will readily agree.

“For almost three years, Brazil did not have a forward who was good enough,” says Pelé, “but there is no doubt that the best striker in the world now is Romario.”

Pelé does not view Brazil’s recent problems in isolation, but rather as part of what he considers a general decline in the sport which his generation of countrymen did so much to turn into a flamboyant, attacking spectacle.

“It’s a worldwide problem,” he opines. “The mind of the coach now is directed at telling the team, ‘Don’t let in goals, don’t take risks’. This is the game of today and so it is difficult to score goals. I think the game went into decline when teams stopped using wingers. The last great winger in the world was George Best. In Brazil it was Jairzinho – and that is nearly 25 years ago. Before that, we had Garrincha.

“Yes, they still use the wings today, but now they ask the full-backs to do it. Today, the full back must be able to go, cross and then come back and defend. This is the big change. With wingers, the game opened out, but now everyone tries to play in the middle. Too many teams play defensively today and I just do not understand the mind of the coach who wants to play that way.”

Pelé argues that standards of individual skill and technique have also slumped.

“The last World Cup, in Italy, was the worst that I have seen and I have seen ten,” he declares. “There were not enough quality young players; Milla from the Cameroon was one of the best and he was 38! I was asked by the Organising Committee to help pick the best player of the tournament and it took us two days to find one. In the end, we decided on Lothar Mattheus because he was the most consistent.”

Understandably then, Pelé is not approaching the US World Cup with any sense of heady expectation. “As a show it will be very successful and every game will be a sell-out,’’ he predicts, “but I can only hope that the games will be as exciting and full of goals.”

To look at Pelé, you could be forgiven for thinking that he might be a participant in, rather than an observer of, next Summer’s activities. A remarkably youthful 53, it is hard to believe that it is 24 years since he became the first professional footballer to score 1,000 goals – a milestone achieved with a penalty for Santos in Rio’s Maracana Stadium that earned him equal billing on the front pages of the Brazilian press with the second Moon landing.

But then, his career has been a procession of such ground-breaking events, from scoring in the 1958 World Cup Final in Sweden aged just 17 to retirement from the national stage in 1971 when he did a lap of honour at the Maracana after his final appearance for Brazil (a 2-2 draw with Yugoslavia) as 180,000 weeping fans chanted “Fica, Fica” (“Stay, Stay”).

He is also undoubtedly the only footballer in history to have been sent off and allowed back on in the course of a match. It happened during a game in Colombia when Pelé was dismissed for disputing a referee’s decision. What happened next was that incensed fans stormed the pitch, the official had to be rescued by police, a linesman was hastily appointed referee and Pelé was brought back on to placate the crowd.

And just in case you’re still in any doubt about the magnitude of his global impact, the man himself will happily remind you that in a poll carried out some years ago, his was found to be the most recognisable name on the planet, ahead of Coca-Cola and the Pope – in that order.

However, there is a limit even to Pelé’s powers and he is quick to dismiss recent press reports that quoted him as claiming he had developed the power to heal the sick. What happened, he says, is that he gave an interview in which he spoke about how inspiring some sick and underprivileged children found their encounters with him – but his words were twisted by an excitable reporter to make it sound like he was claiming healing hands. Likewise, he says that suggestions he might stand for the Brazilian presidency owe more to the fevered imaginings of the tabloid press than anything else. Still, it’s a pity about those powers of healing; had the force really been with Pelé I might have asked him to stick around and try laying his hands on Niall Quinn’s knee.

And, finally, staying with matters close to home – what does Pelé think of the Irish football team? (he asked nervously).

“Very competitive,” comes the diplomatic reply, followed by the revelation that where once they only knew “Big Jack”, people in Brazil now also know “Roy” and “Andy” - although, somehow, that Brazilian penchant for single names just doesn’t translate into an Irish context. Most disappointingly, Pelé does not know “Paul” - the original Black Pearl is not familiar with the Inchicore version.

But if Ireland were to meet Brazil in America and McGrath was to keep Romario under wraps, then you know that Pelé would be the first to recognise that greatness comes in different packages. It’s just that, in the case of Pelé, they definitely broke the mould.