UNTOUCHABLE

Zinedine Zidane is a difficult man to impress.

For his glittering 17-year playing career, the former Real Madrid coach is remembered as one of the finest midfielders in football history. A majestic technician, his central role in title wins in Italy and Spain, as well as Champions League and World Cup triumphs, saw him named FIFA World Player of the Year three times.

And he was the ultimate big-game player: a scorer of three World Cup final goals and, thanks to his spectacular volley against Bayer Leverkusen in 2002, architect of arguably the greatest ever goal scored in a European final.

Yet when Zidane’s multitude of gifts coalesced sublimely in the summer of 2000 for the most exceptional tournament performance of his gilded career – and, it could be argued, the best any player had produced since Diego Maradona at the1986 World Cup – the Frenchman’s standards were so high that his self-appraisal amounted to little more than a Gallic shrug.

“At Euro 2000 I played well,” he told The Independent in 2004, “but not brilliantly. I did not always shine.”

Such an assessment might have been fair of Zidane’s role in France’s 1998 World Cup win on home soil when,