Don’t Miss This…

… World Cup Stories
9:00pm – 10:00pm
BBC2
VIDEO Plus+: 3733
Subtitled, Widescreen

Ever heard of Garrincha? Football fans of a certain age will have done, though he achieved nothing like the fame of his Brazilian team-mate Pele. This trip through Brazil’s World Cup history, full of grainy clips and magic moments, lies under the spell that Garrincha still casts. Brazil never lost a game when he and Pele were both playing. Seeing him waltzing past Russian defenders in 1958 is a joy. (“They put the first man in space but they couldn’t mark Garrincha,” says one contributor here.) And his legendary bad-boy antics are eye-opening, too, even by the standards of today’s players. “He thought with his you-know-what,” one colleague remembers (and lest we’re in any doubt, there he is in the shower, you-know-what to the fore). Garrincha died relatively young, but his contribution to Brazil’s unrivalled World Cup record deserves the tribute it gets here.