– 30 years ago, football touched Switzerland right in the heart
This month of June 2024, Switzerland is celebrating 30 years of its formidable epic at the 1994 World Cup. A crazy momentum which still carries Swiss football today.
Published today at 9:05 a.m.
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BotTalk
Thirty years. This is what separates Switzerland from its love at first sight for football. Although memory may be selective, the heart never forgets its first love. Because it made the thrill spin, because it sent certainties flying, because afterward nothing was ever the same.
Before? It was nothingness. A nation disunited, overwhelmed and defeated. Afterwards, it was too much. A proud, united and conquering football country. It seems as if you had to experience the pitiful thirty (no qualification for the final phases between 1966 and 1994) to better enjoy the glorious thirty (eleven qualifications between 1994 and 2024).
At the crossroads of these two eras, a man. Roy Hodgson. Improbable icon, outdated frock coat but radically modern ideas. Fallen from the sky, through the clouds, what a happy omen.
Switzerland had just been torn apart over accession to Europe in four languages, so it needed an interpreter with a delicious English accent, a neutral and phlegmatic unifier, to reconcile all its ardors. French-speaking people, German-speaking people, people from Ticino, mountain dwellers and urban dwellers, loud-mouthed or stingy with words, make up the matrix of this team which has ignored divisions to strut across the world in astonishing osmosis.
There was more dissonance between these fellows than there will ever be between the Alemannic yasseurs and the Balkan segundos. Georges Bregy on alphorn and Alain Sutter on electric guitar. Adrian Knup on accordion and Stéphane Chapuisat on triangle. A cacophony? Hodgson created a polyphonic symphony – you don’t need to shout the national anthem for it to ring true, it was true even then.
From this epic to the 1994 World Cup, there remains a founding myth. Detroit is the Grütli of football. This crazy momentum that has taken Switzerland to the heights for three decades.
Thirty years. We see the images again, those that remain, those that stand out. We rewatch the film, and it still thrills, because the heart has not forgotten anything. The butterflies that frolic, the bells that chime, the hairs that wiggle. Remembering this thrill is the assurance of never being jaded.
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