“An absurd gag”: the wonderful story of Just Fontaine’s 13 goals at the 58 World Cup

The path to legend isn’t always a clear highway. The one that led Just Fontaine to the firmament in 1958 is as grandiose as it is incredible. It made the striker one of the first stars of French football, a name known to all at a time when images of his exploits were extremely rare. His 13 goals during the World Cup in Sweden made Fontaine a myth, which still seems difficult to reach today. Today’s evidence, this fantastic story, had everything to never exist.

Far from being a holder in Blues

If the Swedish World is registered with the seal of Just Fontaine, the Rémois was not even sure to be part of it a few weeks earlier. A prolific center forward with the Stade de Reims, he is not, however, one of the main weapons of the France team. He has only five caps in five years with the Blues before the World Cup, and has scored only one goal in the selection in the last 53 months. If he finished top scorer in Division 1 in 1957-1958 (34 goals), he dragged a knee injury which caused him to miss almost two months of competition during the winter. Fontaine was then only a rotation player for coach Albert Batteux, who was also his coach in Reims.

From holey shoe to golden shoe

In Sweden too, Fontaine has the right to a new helping hand from fate, when he has just broken one of his shoes. “We only had two pairs of shoes at the time and no sponsor. I found myself with nothing.“One of the substitutes in attack, Stéphane Bruey, is fortunate to be the same size as “Justo”. Who used to have his crampons waxed by… René Bliard, as Fontaine recounted in his autobiography stolen. Funny irony.

France got off to a bad start in their opening match against Paraguay, who led 1-0. Fontaine equalizes. Then double the bet six minutes later. The South American formation will lead a time 3-2, before exploding 7-3 under the blows of the Blues, and their new star center forward, who ends the match with a hat-trick and two assists. The Tricolores then lost against Yugoslavia 3-2 (despite a double from Fontaine) but obtained their qualification by dominating Scotland 2-1, carried by their infernal duo Kopa – Fontaine, both scorers, Fontaine even reversing the roles by offering an achievement to his playmaker.

Because if he is not the tallest of attackers (1.74m), Fontaine has an innate sense of placing himself in the surface, where the danger is created, in particular by maestro Raymond Kopa. “Justo was the attacker who matched my game perfectly. He felt perfectly what I was doing and I was sure to find him at the end of my dribbles“, explained Kopa. In whom Fontaine saw a “oldest brother“, whom he replaced numerically at Stade de Reims, when the playmaker left for Real Madrid in 1956.”Raymond had character, me too and it made a magic duo” he said in 2017. The one who will lead France to a course that no one saw coming, not even the French Football Federation, which only sends its team with three sets of jerseys, one per game from the first round.

A goal in each of his six matches, unheard of

The quarter-final against Northern Ireland looks like a formality. France leads 1-0 at half-time, then 2-0 just before the hour mark thanks to the helmet shot of its number 17. The goal of the double from Just Fontaine is as if ahead of its time, the panoply attacker’s total. Served by Kopa at the entrance to the area, Fontaine puts down his defender with a fake shot, shifts, feels the goalkeeper coming out to better mystify him with an impeccably crossed shot. “You have to go back very, very far in history to find traces of a team that played in Sweden with as much elegance as the French.” rejoices the local daily Svenska Dagbladet.

Just Fontaine is in orbit. France inherits in the semi-finals from Brazil, big favorite of the competition. The Auriverde open the scoring, but Fontaine emerges on a deep serve from Kopa, of course. Quicker than the Brazilian goalkeeper, he equalized in the ninth minute, while Pelé and others had not conceded a single goal until then. They will end up taking off in the second period (5-2) played 10 against 11 by the Blues, deprived of their captain Robert Jonquet seriously injured in the 36th minute, at a time when substitutions are not yet authorized.

Scorer in his first five World Cup matches, Fontaine was on the brink of a fresh record, the 11 goals of Hungarian Sandor Kocsis in the 1954 edition alone. He missed two goals against West Germany in of the final for third place to tie that mark. The festival begins in the 16th minute, on a counter-attack and facing the empty goal. This second goal to tie Kocsis’s mark is at the end of his foot, even before the half hour mark, but he lets Raymond Kopa strike and score the 2-1 penalty. He will not allow himself time to regret, barely nine minutes to sign his double.

France leads 4-2 around the last quarter of an hour and will finish third, but the record is denied to “Justo”. So he decided to go get it himself, bringing the ball up from the central circle against a very passive – even fearful – West German defense before crossing his shot at the entrance to the area. He will even add a fourth goal to his crazy total, at the very end of the match.