Classic Moments: Benjamin Massing Well And Truly Nobbles Claudio Caniggia At 1990 World Cup (Video)

Chris Wright

8th, June 2015

3 Comments

By Chris Wright

They used to call Claudio Caniggia ‘El Hijo del Viento’ (The Son of the Wind) during his pomp because of his uncanny ability to swirl and breeze past defenders while running flat out.

Faced with the prospect of having to stop the wind at Italia ’90 during an 89th-minute Argentina counter-attack, Cameroon defender Benjamin Massing came up with an ingenious solution – hitting Caniggia with the hardest thigh-high battering ram tackle he possibly could.

In fact, today is actually the 25th anniversary of Massing’s superbly brazen hack-job so let’s all enjoy it again one more time…

Proper tackling. Some even say it was the best tackle in World Cup history, and who are we to disagree?

Good times, though we can’t quite believe it was a quarter of a century ago.

*Sigh* 

Where does the time go?

Posted in Hardmen, Injuries, Newsnow, Retro, Videos, World Cup

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3 Comments

  1. Maria says:

    Not sure I can agree with celebrating an assault on another player. He had absolutely no intention of winning that ball, just stopping Caniggia. That’s not a tackle it’s just a foul.

  2. Liam says:

    ^^^^ Awwwwwww, isn’t that precious.

  3. Joe says:

    And that was just a YELLOW CARD foul! Can you imagine how someone like Neymar would have reacted to that foul? 25 years later he’d still be rolling around.

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