Pills, thrills and last-minute goals. Adventures in Clubland is a long-running MUNDIAL series where football fans tell us all about players who were at their clubs for a good time, not a long time. This week, we’re off to Marseille, where an all-time great inspired a love supreme for one glorious season…
It’s 8.09pm on October 22nd, 2003. The sun has long since sunk into the sea, a chill and a mist are enveloping the stands, and 49,000 people have crammed into Stade Vélodrome to watch Olympique de Marseille take on José Mourinho’s ascendant FC Porto. The first 24 minutes are a blur of flying limbs and missed chances, of Deco and Costinha committing niggly fouls and a build of up congestion—an early instance of the patented José away-from-home vortex of pain, the tactical equivalent of causing a pile-up outside the M25 approach to the Dartford Tunnel, a whole day ground to a halt and become a monument to human misery.
Then, suddenly, a streak of light: a long, speculative through-ball from Fabio Celestini is cushioned down by Steve Marlet just outside of the penalty area and into the path of one Didier Drogba. In the unenviable position of being sandwiched between Jorge Costa and Ricardo Carvalho, Didier still has a lot to do. Squeezing through the narrowest of gaps, weathering a crafty kick to the obliques and a grapple from Carvalho, Didier collects the ball on his shin with one touch and pokes it past the onrushing Vitor Baia with another, black Nike Mercurials extending beyond the keeper and taking off immediately, rushing towards the arrayed masses in the Virage Sud.
“I felt like I had hardly sat down, and then this giant wearing a No. 11 shirt had already scored,” Mourinho remembered in his preface to Drogba's memoir, Commitment: My Autobiography. “I can still see him celebrating that goal as if it was his last, transforming the crowd into a great ball of fire, of chants and emotion.”