Brian Clough loved humiliating goalkeepers. It was nothing personal, just business. “I was king of the castle,” he said. “I used to stick it through their bloody legs and say, ‘Now pick that out!’” The phrase “pick that out” is familiar to everyone who grew up with football as their BFF, whether they first heard it from a commentator like Clive Tyldesley, or Roy Race as he provided, via the medium of the speech bubble, a simultaneous commentary on his own inimitable heroism.

In Clough’s day the phrase was used for all types of goals, but in modern times it has been associated with one genre: the screamer. Pick that out. (There are a couple of popular four-word versions as well, but this is a family website). The phrase might have been invented for Gabriel Batistuta, such was his portfolio of visceral belters. He belonged to a dying breed of strikers: the true No9 who, as Gregg Bakowski discussed in his superb Golden Goal on Alan Shearer a fortnight ago, whacked the ball as if they meant to kill it. They certainly gave added meaning to the cliché of centre-forward as hitman.

Batigol, as he was nicknamed, was also a very subtle finisher, but in the mind’s eye he’ll always be ruthlessly roofing one from 25 yards. Everyone will have a favourite goal; a personal choice is his monstrous finish against Arsenal at Wembley in October 1999. It’s hard to recall a goal quite so emphatic. It was the last truly great goal at the old Wembley, and a reminder that Batistuta’s right boot had a sweet spot the size of Gibraltar. This was not just a Batigol; it was a Batigolazo.

The Serie A underdogs



The 1999-2000 season was the first in which more than two teams from one country were allowed in the Champions League. Italy, Spain and Germany had four teams each. England, sixth in the Uefa coefficient table, also behind France and the Netherlands, had three: Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea. Uefa introduced a second group stage for the first time, a development that lasted four years before they switched to an extra knock-out round. Valencia, who eventually lost 3-0 to Real Madrid in the final, played 19 games in the competition.



The tournament was changing in other ways: we didn’t know it at the time, but the golden age of Serie A was over. There was an Italian team in nine of the 10 finals between 1989 and 1998, but Manchester United put out both Internazionale and Juventus on the way to the Treble in 1999 and for the next three seasons Serie A was like a shambling, weathered drunk shouting: “Don’t you know who I am?” Only one of the 24 Champions League quarter-finalists between 1999-2000 and 2001-02 were Italian, and that team, Lazio, were splattered 5-2 away to Valencia on their way out of the competition.



Golden Goal: Alan Shearer for Newcastle United v Everton (2002) | Gregg Bakowski Read more

Fiorentina’s expectations were different to the other Italian sides. They had no real European reputation and as such were the rarest of things in late 90s football: the Italian underdog. This was their first appearance in the European Cup for 30 years, and only their third appearance in any European competition since they lost the final of the Uefa Cup to Juventus nine years earlier. In 1998-99 they were chucked out of the Uefa Cup when a fan threw a bomb at a linesman during a match against Grasshoppers.



They qualified by finishing third in Serie A, 14 points behind the champions Milan. The league table never lies, but sometimes it can be economical with the truth: Fiorentina were serious contenders for their first title since 1969, and topped the table at the end of January. Then Batistuta suffered an injury that even Shakespeare might have deemed too cruel, and his forward partner Edmundo buggered off to Brazil for the Rio carnival without permission. Fiorentina won only three of the final 15 league games.



Arsenal had finished second in 1998-99, two points behind Manchester United in the greatest Premier League title race. They failed in the Champions League, knocked out in the group stage by an excellent Dynamo Kyiv. The commercial decision to play their home games at Wembley, which had double the capacity of Highbury, backfired: they drew at home to Kyiv and lost to an average Lens side. Although Arsenal’s Back Four had two superb campaigns in the Cup Winners’ Cup in the mid-90s, winning in 1994 and reaching the final in 1995, the Champions League was a step up in class.

The chances of qualification increased in 1999-2000, with 16 rather than eight teams going through from the first group stage. But their group was a stinker: Barcelona, Fiorentina and the Swedish makeweights AIK. Admirable draws away to Fiorentina and Barcelona gave them a false sense of maturity, despite Patrick Vieira’s astonishing mistake in the Nou Camp. But in the return match at Wembley, Barcelona administered an intravenous injection of harsh reality with a 4-2 win. Arsenal played some of their best attacking football of the season, yet this was a familiar story in the 1990s: a talented but naive English side killed on the counter-attack by players with more nous and experience. Even Phillip Cocu’s blatant dive for the first goal seemed to sum up the difference in street wisdom. Barcelona had significantly less possession than Arsenal and scored four goals. Yes, they really were managed by Louis van Gaal.



It meant that, going into the penultimate game at home to Fiorentina, the situation was buttock-clenchingly clear: with both teams level on five points, and head-to-head record trumping goal difference, a win for either side would put them into the last 16. A draw kept both alive going into the final games – Fiorentina at home to Barcelona, Arsenal away to AIK – though a score draw would give Fiorentina a head-to-head advantage after a 0-0 draw in the first game.



Arsenal were having a few domestic troubles too. Vieira was in the middle of a six-game ban for spitting at that old charmer Neil Ruddock and threatening to have a square go with a policeman in the tunnel. Though we did not realise it at the time, they were beginning an occasionally painful two-year transition between Arsène Wenger’s two great Arsenal sides. Yet they were second in the table, in between David O’Leary’s Leeds and Peter Reid’s newly promoted Sunderland, after a spectacular 3-2 win over Chelsea the previous weekend. Arsenal were 2-0 down with 15 minutes to go before Kanu scored an outrageous, iconic hat-trick that included a brilliant winner from an absurd angle. It wasn’t the last such goal Arsenal fans would see that week.

The bite of the snake

Kanu and Dennis Bergkamp were Wenger’s preferred front pair at the time, an intriguing, counter-intuitive combination to tide Arsenal over while Thierry Henry took a crash course in playing as a centre-forward. Henry, who started none of Arsenal’s six Champions League games that season, was on the bench with Davor Suker for this game and was not to become a regular until December. Vieira was available in Europe, and played alongside Emmanuel Petit for the first time since the middle of August. Indeed this was the first time all season that Wenger was able to able to pick his best XI.



Arsenal’s problems were nothing compared to Fiorentina’s. They had lost their third consecutive Serie A match the previous weekend, after which their coach Giovanni Trapattoni offered his resignation. This narked Batistuta, a fiercely proud and loyal man; he defended Trapattoni, said the players were to blame, and vowed to do something about it.



For a Trapattoni team, the result was everything at the best of times, never mind when they had their back moulded into the wall and qualification was at stake. In the second minute Batistuta was booked for ploughing through Lee Dixon, a zealous reversal of the normal practice of a defender letting the attacker know he’s around early on. Plenty thought Batistuta might have been sent off, though by the standards of 1999 it was surely just a yellow card.

As the match developed Arsenal, though never truly dominant, missed a number of half and three-quarter chances, the best driven just wide by Bergkamp at the start of the second half. At the other end Batistuta was purposeful but ineffective. Yet even that produced a slight sense of foreboding, like it was all part of some grand, sinister plan. “They are defensively secure and play quite deep,” said Wenger of Fiorentina before the game. “They are like snakes, they have spurts and in five minutes they can kill you. You can feel you are on top of the game but suddenly if your concentration goes down they have the individual quality to be dangerous when it is you who think you are in control of the game. So you are thinking you are OK but suddenly one individual will do something special and score.”

Golden Goal: Ian Wright for Arsenal v Leeds United (1995) | Rob Smyth Read more

Arsène knew. In the 75th minute, so did everybody else. Vieira was tackled in midfield by Aldo Firicano, and Fiorentina moved the ball economically to create space for Jorg Heinrich to burst from midfield. He reached the D and then played the ball to Batistuta, lurking near the right corner of the penalty box. With Heinrich falling over as he played the pass under pressure, Batistuta had only one man in support against four Arsenal defenders. In other words, there was nothing much on. Three touches and three seconds later the ball was in the net.

It’s inevitable that we remember only the finish, but the second touch was almost as good. First Batistuta cushioned the ball, inviting Nigel Winterburn towards him. As Winterburn started to make his move, so Batistuta made his: he quickly dragged the ball down the line, which gave him a slight but crucial headstart. He galumphed towards the ball, but the angle had become so tight that it seemed he had no option but to smash the ball low across goal and hope for the best.

As if. As Winterburn lunged into a desperate block tackle, Batistuta stretched to scorch a rising drive over David Seaman and into the far corner. It was an astonishing goal, the sort to bring out the Alan Partridge in all of us. And the primitive beast. There are thousands of prettier, classier goals in football history, but Batistuta’s is one of the greats of its genre: the primal screamer. We are hard-wired to be stimulated by such goals.



Seaman might be an exception to that. This was another entry to the unwanted portfolio of iconic goals scored past him: Gascoigne, Nayim, Giggs, Batistuta and later Ronaldinho. After the goal came a familiar celebration. Batistuta’s trademark may have been the machine-gun salute, but it was even more common to see him maraud at half pace on a mini lap of honour, hair and gums flapping as his arms pumped in triumph. It was like he needed to do a warm-down after scoring.



Batistuta was perfect for a side managed by Trapattoni, who was a disciple of catenaccio. Many strikers are deadly when they get one chance; Batistuta could be deadly when he got no chances, such was his ability to manufacture something out of nothing. This was the only shot on target Fiorentina had all match.



The goal was savagely decisive in more ways than one, as it put Fiorentina through and Arsenal out – the last time, until next week at least, that they have gone out of the Champions League before Christmas. It was the kind of goal that brings a lump to a partisan throat. Just imagine how good it must have been to be a Fiorentina fan at 10.17pm on 27 October 1999.

Or at 10.28pm, when Suker hit the post and Kanu’s close-range follow-up was unfathomably saved by the sprawling Francesco Toldo. Arsenal were out, with only the consolation prize of a Uefa Cup place. “I have to concede it was a mistake,” said Wenger of the Wembley experiment, and they played their Uefa Cup home matches at Highbury. They won all four games, including a 5-1 trouncing of the eventual Spanish champions Deportivo, in which Kanu scored a delightful goal, before losing on penalties to Galatasaray in the final. Petit and Marc Overmars went to Barcelona in the summer, and Wenger started to build a new side that would reach even greater heights. Fiorentina were about go in a different direction.



A warrior who will not surrender



These days we know about every Tom, Dick and Owski, but in 1999 – when dial-up internet was so slow that loading a ZX Spectrum seemed like a meditative experience by comparison, and print coverage of foreign leagues was minimal – that was not the case. The Champions League still had an air of the exotic. Unless you were one of the 47 people in England who had ONDigital, there was only one live game on ITV for every Champions League week.

Disciples of Football Italia on Channel 4 knew how good Batistuta was, but for the majority he was seen only at World Cups, when he had been eye-catching but, as the peerless historian Cris Freddi put it, a “rabbit killer”. His goal against Arsenal – live on ITV, at the expense of Coronation Street – gave him an instant aura in this country.



A distinctive aura, too. Not since Killer BOB wrought havoc in Twin Peaks had long hair been quite so terrifying. It was all part of Batistuta’s image, adding to the sense of a wild beast who could not be tamed, even if in real life he was a gentle soul. “I am still moved by the little things in life – something my children do or my wife says, a call from my parents, from a friend, a song, a movie. I get a lump in my throat when I see old people struggling,” he said early in 2000, not long before larruping another ultraviolent goal against Manchester United to celebrate the belated re-release of A Clockwork Orange two days later.



That season was the personal peak of his career – his 29 goals in all competitions, and his fourth place in the Ballon d’Or in 1999 were both career-bests. (The European Golden Shoe, incidentally, was won by Kevin Phillips, still the only Englishman to do so.) It seemed Batistuta might join United in the summer of 2000 – he called them “the best team in the world” and “a cool club” – but he went to Roma for £23.5m, still a world record for a player in his thirties, after a cunning plan from Fabio Capello. In his first season, Roma won their first title for 18 years.

Despite that, he is indelibly associated with Fiorentina. Some players ‘get’ their club in a way that is not easy to define; Batistuta certainly did. In 1996, the fans erected a life-size bronze statue of their purple-shirted warrior. It read: “He is a warrior who will not surrender, who is hard in the fight but is fair in the soul.” Batistuta could have been a cousin of Matthew Le Tissier, turning down umpteen moves to bigger clubs because he was happy and he loved the club. He even stayed when they were relegated to Serie B. “One title with this club is worth more than 10 with Milan or Juventus,” he said. He won the Coppa Italia with Fiorentina; then, at 31, he decided to move to Rome to try to win a title, the sporting equivalent of a dying man’s final wish. Only the most irredeemable eejits begrudged him. When he was inducted into Fiorentina’s half of fame in 2014, he burst into tears.



Fiorentina did not make it beyond the second group stage in 1999-2000, with United and the eventual finalists Valencia progressing. Parma went out in the qualifiers, Milan in the group stage and Lazio in the quarter-final, the start of an horrendous three years in which Serie A was a complete shambles in the Champions League. But for a team who only made the last 16, Fiorentina left a fair impression: as well as Batistuta’s searing brilliance, Mauro Bressan’s long-range overhead kick against Barcelona was voted into Uefa’s top 10 goals of the last 60 years. (It’s a wildly overrated goal, but that’s another story …)

They may have been streetwise in their play, but in their attitude to the tournament there was an infectious innocence and enthusiasm about Fiorentina, with none of the entitlement that the bigger teams have. Their unfettered, disbelieving celebrations at the final whistle at Wembley were those of an underdog, with Batistuta lassoing his shirt above his head, and the atmosphere for their home games – particularly when they beat the defending champions United 2-0 – was magnificent. It was an adventure in the way it could never be for the Serie A aristrocracy.

Golden Goal: Dennis Bergkamp for Arsenal v Newcastle (2002) | Alan Smith Read more

Not being part of the aristocracy has a downside too. Fiorentina were in serious financial trouble, and even the eventual sale of Batistuta, Rui Costa and Toldo for around £70m was not enough to save the club. They went bankrupt and effectively ceased to exist, before reforming as Fiorentina e Florentia Viola and reappearing in Serie C2. Two years later they returned to Serie A, since then they have developed a monopoly on fourth place, finishing there in five of the last eight seasons. This time they hope to go at least one better. They are currently third, two points behind the leaders Napoli.

Arsenal know about finishing in the top four as well. They have done so every season under Wenger. But his great Arsenal teams never really cracked Europe. They didn’t get past the second group stage in 2001-02 and 2002-03, and then the Invincibles blew the club’s best chance to win the tournament by losing at home to Chelsea in the quarter-finals. Had they won, they would only have had to beat Monaco and José Mourinho’s Porto to win the competition.

Porto were an excellent side, but you would take them in a Champions League final. Arsenal could have killed the Mourinho curse at source, and maybe changed football history in the process. Then again, if Mourinho’s Porto had beaten the Invincibles, in addition to what he has subsequently done to Arsenal, they would never hear the end of it. “I cannot call them the Invincibles, because I beat them.”

That’s another story. This one is about somebody else who beat Arsenal on his own, about a goal that is seared into the memory and forever trapped in the speech bubble: pick that out.

