Greatest feint: The magical Pele miss that is part of football folklore

Pele is rushing towards the ball. So is the celebrated Uruguayan goalie Ladislao Mazurkiewicz, who would win the best goalkeeper of the tournament award in that 1970 World Cup. Pele is blurring across from the right of the midfield when his team-mate Tostado kicks the ball up towards centre from left, an almost perfectly weighted pass. Perhaps, a milligram or two less of force would have made it absolutely perfect but Pele was tearing up after it like a man possessed.

And he was a man possessed. When he was just 9 years old, he would slip out of his home, leaving his footballer father Dondinho and friends hunched over a radio, lening to the commentary of the 1950 World Cup game against Uruguay. They were all sipping a beer and laughing as Brazil were in lead, but when Uruguay scored an equaliser and Pele remembers in his autobiography that the commentator had to re-iterate it again as he knew the Brazilians wouldn’t believe it.
Young Pele was dawdling around with a football but when the fireworks in the neighbourhood suddenly stopped and his father’s friends walked out of the home looking dazed. When he called out, his father would turn around with tears streaming down his face and blurted out twice, “Brazil lost, Brazil lost, Dico!”.
Dico was Pele’s nickname at home. His mother had to gently take him away, telling him to let his father be. A shocked Pele would cry and tell his father not to worry, one day he will take revenge against Uruguay. Now, it’s 1970. On the eve of the game, someone tells Pele and other players, “They have been like a bone in our throat for 20 years. We have to beat them.” They didn’t know that Pele had his own motivations too. And so, now, he was galloping after the ball.
So was Mazurkiewicz, sprinting out to reach the crescent outside the box to meet the ball. The ball is between them, closer to the advancing Pele but increasingly tumbling towards the goalie, who enters the crescent first, the ball is still rolling between them, with Pele encroaching. Like a good goalie, Mazurkiewicz bends his knees, spreads his arms wide, trying to inflate himself into as big a shield as possible as he now expects the moment of the Pele strike is upon him.
The dread thought in Mazurkiewicz’s mind must be what if Pele doesn’t strike at this moment but taps the ball to his right, position himself as a shield and sink in a left-footer at the open goal. With no time for the defender Ancheta to provide any cover, Mazurkiewicz would be left with no option but to foul Pele and hope. Would Pele take that move?
Why didn’t Pele do it?
The question as the ageing journal Murilo once posed the author Sergio Rodrigues: Why didn’t Pele do it? “Now I’m asking you, Neto, why didn’t Pelé do that? It was the right thing to do, wasn’t it?” He answers it himself with this gem.

“In his refusal to touch the ball, Pele stripped football to its most rarefied essence. Football became a pure idea, and all of a sudden neither men, nor the ball, nobody at all was behaving as one would expect them to do in this illusory world. Taken surprise, like the rest of us, Mazurka sees the ball passing to his left and cutting like a knife across the right flank of the penalty area, while Pelé becomes a golden and blue light flashing towards the opposite side,” he is quoted in the Hazlitt magazine.
“Pele now is Pele. He is sick and tired of hearing that he is a legend, a demigod, so what has he got to lose trying to become an absolute god? So he doesn’t do the right thing, he does something sublime.”
Pele doesn’t touch the ball. Instead, at that very point where he could have either fired a shot or dribbled, he chooses not to touch; he runs into a little detour to his left.
The effect on Mazurkiewicz is even more startling. As if he were transfixed, caught in the Pele trance, he drusts his eyes. World’s best goalkeeper mixes up the illusion with the reality. The ball is in front of him to pluck, but so sure he is about Pele’s greatness, that wondrous mind and the springy right foot, he follows that illusion. As if in fear that the ball right in front of him is a mirage, it’s actually attached to the greatest right foot known in footballing hory at that point. And so, Mazurkiewicz lets the ball alone, and lunges towards Pele, dazed.
Of course, then Pele cuts to his right and hurries after the ball and even as Ancheta huffs into the box, Pele would make his only make. He would rush into the pivot turn at the far end, but as he was at the wrong side of the ball, the half-turn he attempted goes awry, and his kick would take the ball just wide of the goal. He then saunters back, popping a gum or an ice-cube, as it’s been said, into his mouth, as if he is tooth-picking after a satisfying wedding feast – relaxed and ever-so cool.
Decades later, he would write in his autobiography, “Sometimes I dream that I hit the back of the net. I didn’t play that thinking how it would look though – I just really wanted Brazil to win; it seemed a good scoring option then. But sometimes life gets in the way.”
The other day during the Qatar world cup, a Pele snapshots video would go viral: Pele doing all the modern dribbling moves decades earlier than all the modern variants other strikers from Messi to Maradona to Ronaldos (R9 and Criano). Been there, done that – Pele style.
A few years after the 1970 game, in a club match, Norberto “Beto” Alonso would do the Pele ‘runaround’ move, scoring in a 7-2 win against Independiente. In 1995, in another club game, the Swedish professional Jesper Blomqv too would successfully do a Pele, the left-footed striker cutting to his right, letting the ball pass through the goalie, before pivoting to strike the ball into the net. The ball was moving at a far less speed this time, though, and moreover, it’s the original vision – that this can be even thought off – belongs to the pioneer Pele. The greatest goal would remain the goal that never was; perhaps it’s more romantic this way. That even the great(est) can fail. Sometimes, life does get in the way.
The last word, then, to Murilo, the journal who was there at the stadium that day. “What happened there was simple: Pelé challenged God and lost. Imagine if he hadn’t lost. If he hadn’t lost, the human race would never have slept peacefully again. Pelé challenged God and lost, but what a majestic challenge. That goal he didn’t score is not only the greatest moment in the story of Pelé, it is also the greatest moment in the hory of football.”