Euro 2016 - Memories of Seville '82 linger as France bid to ‘get their own back’ against Germany

Patrick Battiston had been on the field for 10 minutes when he ran on to Michel Platini’s chipped ball over the West Germany defence. As the goalkeeper Toni Schumacher charged from his box, Battiston poked the ball past him. As the ball bounced just wide of the post, Schumacher clattered into the French substitute. It has become perhaps the most notorious foul in the history of the game – all the more so as the Dutch referee Charles Corver gave no free-kick, much less a card of either colour.

Battiston lay unconscious, two teeth dislodged, three ribs cracked, vertebrae damaged. Michel Platini, France’s captain, has said he thought he may have been dead. Seville’s police force had, for reasons still never satisfactorily explained, banned the Red Cross from the touchline. It took three minutes for a stretcher to be summoned. As Battiston was carried off, Platini raised his limp hand and kissed it.

It would be a further half hour before Battiston regained consciousness.

Schumacher stood, hand on hip, impatient to take his goal-kick, utterly unsympathetic. Those who sought to demonise him recalled that a minute or so before his challenge, after France fans had held on to the match ball so another one had to be produced, he had feigned to hurl that into the crowd as well: harmless joking, or a sign of pent-up aggression? The danger always, in such circumstances, is to judge the severity of an offence by the damage done. Schumacher always insisted he had meant no harm, an explanation Battiston seemingly accepted. The challenge was wild, reckless and probably deserved a red card, but nobody surely sets out to injure an opponent with their hip.

France’s manager, Michel Hidalgo, brought on another substitute in Christian Lopez but, farcically, was prevented by a FIFA official from talking to his players because regulations at the time prevented managers issuing tactical instructions during games – football’s authorities, once again, intent in upholding technical minutiae while ignoring far more serious issues.

It was 1-1 at the time, Platini’s 27th-minute strike having cancelled out Pierre Littbarski’s opener. It had been an excellent game, but it rapidly got even better. France attacked with the fury of the righteous, raging against Germany and officialdom. Both teams had chances. In the final seconds, the full-back Manuel Amoros pinged a 35-yarder off the bar, but the ball bounced out. Extra-time.

Three minutes in Hans-Peter Briegel fouled Platini on the right.

Alain Giresse bent the free-kick into the penalty area where Marius Tresor had been left mystifyingly unmarked. He slammed in a volley: 2-1. The great striker Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, who had been struggling with a hamstring problem, came on. Still France poured forwards.

Didier Six teed up Giresse, who curved a shot past Schumacher with the outside of his right foot and in off the post: 3-1. Still France kept attacking. There was a manic quality to their play.

In the midst of a great surge down the right, Giresse was fouled. As Corver played an advantage, Dominique Rocheteau stopped to aid him. But them Platini was bundled off the ball and West Germany broke.

Littbarksi crossed and Rummenigge touched in. After 103 minutes it was 3-2 and France’s domination was over. They had given too much. On a muggy night, fatigue set in. Battiston’s injury 10 minutes after being brought off the bench effectively denied them a substitute. Klaus Fischer equalised with a superb bicycle kick.

For the first time, a World Cup match went to penalties. Uli Stielike’s effort was saved by Jean-Luc Ettori, but again France couldn’t make their advantage count. Schumacher denied Didier Six and Maxime Bossis. Horst Hrubesch, the West German substitute, hammered in the decisive kick.

Hidalgo, usually a quiet, unflappable man – he’d been kidnapped shortly before the 1978 World Cup and had apparently taken the whole incident in his stride – was furious. “People witnessed a great injustice,” he said. “The match reignited the Franco-German antagonism that had faded.”

France went on to win the Euros on home soil two years later but for many it was the defeat in Seville that stood out as the symbol of that great French side. The writer Philippe Auclair spoke movingly at a Blizzard event of how he had never felt more French that he did during that game, and for years its memory dominated French attitudes to German football. “That was my most beautiful game,” said Platini.

France also lost 2-0 to West Germany in the 1986 World Cup final and then 1-0 to Germany in the quarter-final in 2014. It’s only three games, but France haven’t beaten Germany in a competitive fixture since the 3rd-place play off at the 1958 World Cup. Germany, having ended their hoodoo against Italy in the quarter-final, now face a side looking to do the same to them.

But the dynamic has changed. Talk of Seville, of Hidalgo’s antagonism, might have dominated the build-up to Thursday’s semi-final in Marseille had it not been for what happened in Paris last November, when a friendly between France and Germany was targeted as part of a night of terrorism that claimed 130 lives. Germany’s players, unable to return to their hotel, spent the night sleeping on mattresses in the stadium and France’s players, in what the acting head of the German football federation Reinhard Rauball referred to as “an outstanding act of camaraderie”, stayed with them. As many as 13 players who started that night are likely to start on Thursday.

But still, whatever the sense of shared experience, whatever the links and friendships players have formed at clubs, memories of Seville linger. “It will be a great match,” said the France forward Olivier Giroud. “We have a lot of desire to get our own back.”