A VISION PERSUADED Zinédine Zidane to come out of international retirement and something unexplained in his head propelled him back there last night, the France captain leaving football with an indelible stain across his reputation unless the next few days of inquest can uncover evidence that he was the victim of intolerable, verbal provocation.

If not, the eighteenth World Cup final will for ever be associated with the sad, shameful end of a great footballer as much as Italy’s triumph in adversity. Marcello Lippi’s men paraded their trophy in the Olympic Stadium last night under a downpour of silver glitter but the mind kept drifting to the mental state and the whereabouts of Zidane; banned from returning to the pitch to collect his loser’s medal after his dismissal for a violent headbutt.

He had opened the scoring with a uncharacteristically cocky, dinked penalty but, as acts of self-indulgence go, that had nothing on his rhino’s thrust into the chest of Marco Materazzi with ten minutes of extra time remaining.

Had the big defender said something that insulting? Or was there something else eating away at Zidane as he counted down the final minutes of his playing career? As this final was settled by shoot-out — Fabio Grosso completing Italy’s perfect set — and his team condemned to defeat while their leader sat in the dressing room, the prospect of a lifetime of regrets surely overcame him.

Such a petulant end was all the more difficult to explain because France had dominated this final and were still doing so when Zidane departed. He will never know whether the outcome might have been different had he only stayed on the field, but his departure was bound to sap the spirit of his team-mates.

His career has not been without its moments of spite (he was also sent off during the 1998 finals for a stamp), but he had shown no signs of breakdown in this match. He had brought a brilliant save from Gianluigi Buffon in extra time and, on every measurable scale of football dominance, France could claim a moral victory until their captain’s sensational exit.

While Zidane lost his mind, Italy secured their fourth World Cup with the sort of unbreakable will that they had paraded from the moment they arrived in Germany stalked by match-fixing allegations in Serie A.

The scandal that many thought would undermine their campaign united them and they needed that spirit to see them through a testing evening in the Olympic Stadium. Pressed back into their own half for the last hour and more, Fabio Cannavaro and his colleagues refused to blink. Victory was only ever likely to be achieved from the spot but it will still have tasted gloriously sweet given the backdrop and the uncertain fate that awaits many of Lippi’s team.

They were never ahead until David Trezeguet, fatefully, missed his spot-kick in the shoot-out. They fell behind in only the seventh minute to Zidane’s early penalty. It would certainly have been one of the most memorable World Cup-winning goals although no one would have wanted such a grand occasion to be settled by a dive, as Florent Malouda went down after a featherlight touch from Materazzi.

Up stepped Zidane and no one could quite believe what the French maestro tried next. Instead of following his familiar short run with a shot whipped into the bottom corner, Zidane, incredibly, went for the floated chip. It is a method known by the cognoscenti as the Panenka after the man who scored the winning spot-kick in the European Championship final of 1976 but, had it been just inches higher, this one would have gone down as a Crouch. With Buffon down on the ground, the ball struck the underside of the bar and bounced a foot over the line. No one seemed sure whether to celebrate or laugh. The greatest player of his generation was fractions away from looking its greatest idiot — a fate that still awaited him.

It was an extraordinary gamble, but then this was to prove an extraordinary occasion that began with juddering physical intensity from the moment that Thierry Henry ran into Cannavaro’s granite, left shoulder in the first minute.

The second goal was to arrive by the 19th minute when Andrea Pirlo picked out Materazzi with a corner. The former Everton defender was having a busy night and he climbed above Patrick Vieira to beat Fabien Barthez.

While Italy were looking potent with deadballs, it was France who were threatening far more from open play. Henry was in the thick of things, and his grafting performances as a lone striker for Arsenal and France in the past six months have surely destroyed once and for all the idea that he is a flat-track bully.

His team were on the front foot and they should have had another penalty when Gianluca Zambrotta felled Malouda in the penalty area. They continued to press even when Henry was forced off with injury in extra time although, when it came to the shoot-out, there was to be a far more notable absentee.

This was only the second World Cup final to be decided by a penalty shoot-out, but rather than Grosso, they will be talking about the man who was not there for years.