In an extract from his book World In Motion, Simon Hart talks to the late Benjamin Massing, whose flying full-frontal felling of Argentina’s Claudio Caniggia was merely the first of many shocks at Italia 90

The 1990 World Cup began with a bang and no one felt it more than Claudio Caniggia. If Argentina 0-1 Cameroon was the most seismic opening result of any World Cup, there is arguably no more famous a foul in finals history than the one Benjamin Massing, the west African nation’s huge central defender, effected on Caniggia, the long-haired Argentina forward, with two minutes remaining of the tournament’s curtain-raiser at San Siro on 8 June 1990. It is certainly hard to think of a more laughably blatant one.

Not for Massing the sly rake of studs down calf or other such acts of cunningly disguised destructiveness. No, this was full-frontal stuff, cartoonish in its crudeness. Here, the flying Caniggia evades two green shirts but then, splat – the haulage truck, aka Massing, flies into the frame and simply wipes him out.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The three attempts by Cameroon players to stop Claudio Caniggia. Benjamin Massing made the third tackle to earn his second yellow card of the game. Composite: FIFA TV

“It’s a nice thing for me,” says Massing with a grin. “Wherever I go, it’s: ‘Ah, he’s the one who did the tackle on Caniggia.’ Everywhere. Everyone says it to me, even when I went to Equatorial Guinea a few years ago for the Africa Cup of Nations. It’s what people recognise me for. So I have to say, it’s affection I get more than anything else, and if it was a source of money, I’d be a rich man.”

He begins his retelling of the incident with team-mate Emmanuel Kundé, the first man in Caniggia’s path, and, as he puts it in French: “Un partisan de la non-aggression.” It is not meant as a compliment. “He’d come off with his shirt spotless, just as he’d come on,” he says with a frown. “Then I saw Victor [Ndip], who was my direct partner. We knew each other’s game well. He couldn’t get to him. When Caniggia hurdles him, I said: ‘Shit, this is dangerous’.”

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The cheetah-quick Caniggia had picked the ball up five yards outside his own box. He had passed Kundé as he crossed the halfway line, then hurdled – just – the raised boot of Ndip. Ndip’s nibble had left him striving to regain full balance and his head was down and arms flailing as Massing steamed in.

“I was marking Diego Maradona but I left him,” he says. “I thought: ‘If he’s got time to get his balance and pass the ball, we’re stuffed.’ That’s why I came in on him like a truck. I got to Caniggia and flew in on him. I wasn’t thinking that clearly. I was a bit wound up that he’d got past my two colleagues. Knowing that he was breaking clear, and about to get his head up, that was going to be dangerous. And that’s why I really went for it.”

He really did. “No leavy go” is what Massing’s defensive partner Ndip, from the Anglophone south-west of Cameroon, would shout at the French-speaking Massing in pidgin English during matches: don’t let him go. There was no leavy go for poor Caniggia.

Massing claims he once ran 100m in 10.1sec. In he flew, landing on the Argentinian’s left foot and sending him skidding across the turf. Five Argentina players rushed over to protest to the referee Michel Vautrot, as Massing bent down to pull back on the boot which had left his foot with the force of his challenge.

None of the World Cup’s 13 previous opening matches had witnessed a red card. This one had now seen two, with Massing following team-mate André Kana-Biyik into the dressing room. Kana-Biyik thought the match must be over at the sight of his team-mate. “He starts raising his arms and he’s expecting me to do the same,” Massing recalls. “He says: ‘What’s going on?’ So I tell him: ‘No. They’ve sent me off too’.”

To underline the size of the shock witnessed by the crowd of 73,780, it is worth noting no team from south of the Sahara had ever won a World Cup finals match before. Three Maghreb nations had – Tunisia in 1978, Algeria in 1982, and Morocco in 1986 – but this was a first for black Africa. And they had not beaten just any team. Rather, in front of 150 countries watching around the world, Cameroon had upset Maradona’s Argentina: the holders felled by the 500-1 outsiders.

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The impact of Senegal’s scalping of reigning champions France in the opening game of South Korea/Japan 2002 does not compare. Then, Senegal had a starting XI made up entirely of players based in France (compared with only one Ligue 1 player for Les Bleus). Cameroon’s 1990 team, by contrast, included five home-based players, officially termed as amateurs. Only five of their 22-man squad played top-level football abroad. François Omam-Biyik, their match-winner, had – like Massing – spent the preceding season in France’s second tier.

For Cameroon, it was the springboard for their history-making run to the quarter-finals. Moreover, it was a match that set the tone perfectly for what was to follow at Italia 90. There was controversy, drama, brutality. There were pantomime heroes and villains. And, at the end of it, huge headlines.

To review the action through the softer prism of 21st-century sensibilities invites the occasional shudder, and sympathy for Maradona, who rises wearily off the turf more than once, with something approaching stoicism. The final foul count read Cameroon 28 Argentina 9. Each of substitute Caniggia’s first four runs earned a clattering, with Massing’s crushing contribution still to come.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Benjamin Massing gets his marching orders after fouling Claudio Caniggia in the opening match of Italia 90 Photograph: Colorsport/REX/Shutterstock

Not that the crowd, who had whistled loudly through Argentina’s anthem, cared. The two red-carded Cameroonians left the pitch to cheers.

To the Milanese, Maradona, who had just taken the Serie A title down to Naples, was the bogeyman. When Napoli collapsed spectacularly – and, some suggested, suspiciously – in the 1988 title race, Maradona said: “Today, the racist Italy has won.” During Argentina’s preparatory camp in Austria, he had returned to the same theme, speaking of Napoli’s title triumph as “the revenge of the south against the racist north”.

The Argentina captain mined the same seam with his sardonic response following this opening upset: “The only pleasure I got this afternoon was to discover that, thanks to me, the people of Milan have stopped being racist. Today, for the first time, they supported the Africans.”