Knocking you out was a huge joy: how England and Argentina turned football into a two-decade grudge match

The scream still travels. On 30 June 1998, in theGeoffroy-Guichard stadium in Saint-Étienne, an 18-year-old MichaelOwen collected a ball on the halfway line, took four touches past two Argentinian defenders, and finished past Carlos Roa. By the time Owen reached the touchline to celebrate, the Argentina captain Diego Simeone was walking back to the centre circle with a scowl that football would spend the next quarter-century trying to read.

That 2-2 draw, settled by David Beckham's red card and Alan Shearer's penalty, is once again being argued over. The Guardian has published a long oral history of the two World Cup meetings that bookend the rivalry: Saint-Étienne in 1998, and Sapporo four years later, where England again lost on penalties and again departed with a refereeing grievance. The framing is a familiar one, but the texture matters. Simeone, Owen and Glenn Hoddle are quoted remembering the same fixtures from angles that barely overlap.

Two matches, one story

The 1998 tie, played at the Geoffroy-Guichard stadium in Saint-Étienne, ran more than 120 minutes and produced three penalties, a red card, and a draw that Argentina won 4-3 on spot kicks. The Guardian piece is built around three voices: Simeone, who at the time was Argentina's midfield general and is now manager of Atlético Madrid; Owen, the Liverpool teenager who announced himself on a global stage; and Hoddle, the England head coach who later described the defeat as the match that cost him his job. Each is allowed to set the scene in his own words, and each remembers a different villain.

For Simeone, the provocation was tactical and psychological. England had the pace of Owen and the nerve of Beckham. Argentina had to disrupt both, and the foul on Owen that drew Beckham's retaliatory kick was, in the Argentine captain's telling, the kind of street-level foul that decided matches in that era. For Owen, the moment is still bodily: the run, the contact, the crowd. For Hoddle, the regret is procedural. The England bench, he says, never properly prepared the squad for the kind of refereeing that competition's round of 16 had already signalled was coming.

The 2002 meeting, in Sapporo, was colder and shorter. England won 1-0 through a Beckham penalty, the only goal of the match. Argentina finished with three red cards and a sense of injustice that, like everything else in this fixture, has not aged. The Guardian piece is careful to give equal weight to the two games rather than treating 1998 as the only one that matters.

What the oral history adds

Long-form oral reconstructions tend to flatten the matches they describe into anecdote. This one mostly resists that. The decision to put Simeone, Owen and Hoddle on a roughly equal footing is the editorial move. The Argentine view is not treated as decoration around an English centrepiece, which is the usual failing of this kind of retrospective. Simeone is given space to describe the foul on Owen, and the way the bench read Beckham's reaction, in terms that explain rather than excuse. The 1998 match, in his telling, was won as much in the technical area as on the pitch.

Owen's contribution is quieter and more physical. He remembers the noise, the heat, the way the French crowd in Saint-Étienne was already anti-English before kickoff. Hoddle's section is the most generous to the Argentine side and the most critical of his own. He says, in effect, that England walked into a tactical and emotional trap that an older team would have seen coming. The piece is also honest about the political backdrop. The Guardian acknowledges the Falklands memory, the diplomatic chill between the two governments at the time of the 1998 draw, and the way English tabloid coverage framed the Argentine side as a foreign-national caricature rather than a team of players.

Why the rivalry keeps being re-told

The matches are 28 and 24 years old. The players who took part are managers, pundits, and in some cases chairmen. Yet the fixture keeps generating long reads, podcasts, and now this Guardian piece. The structural reason is simple: the two encounters straddled a generational shift in how the English press, and to a lesser extent the Argentine press, covered the national team. 1998 was the last World Cup in which the English tabloids could treat the squad as a cast of soap-opera characters without consequence. 2002 was the first in which the players themselves, Beckham chief among them, were wealthy enough to push back.

Simeone's career since is a useful proxy. He has managed in Spain and Argentina, won the Europa League with Atlético Madrid, and built a reputation as a manager whose touchline confrontations replay the same emotional register as his 1998 foul. The 1998 match is now treated as a preview of the man he became. Owen, by contrast, is read backwards through a series of injuries that shortened what should have been a longer prime. Hoddle's England tenure ended within months of the Saint-Étienne defeat; the 1998 tie is the match that cost him his job.

The Guardian piece does not pretend to settle any of this. It is an oral history, not an argument. But the cumulative effect of giving Simeone, Owen, and Hoddle the same platform is to remind the reader that a 2-2 draw in Saint-Étienne, decided by a missed penalty in the dark, has more than enough interior detail to fill a long afternoon. The rivalry's endurance is not really about the results. It is about the fact that the matches contained, in compressed form, the personalities of every player who took part.

The view from both benches

The counter-narrative, which the piece gestures at without fully endorsing, is that the rivalry is a creation of the English press in 1998 and 2002, and that Argentine football moved on quickly. The Argentine team's view of the two matches, the argument runs, is that they won the more important tie and lost the less important one. Simeone's contribution sits closer to that reading than the English voices do. He is willing to be unromantic about the foul on Owen, and willing to suggest that the real contest in 1998 was between the two benches, not the two teams.

The nuance worth flagging is that the two matches, taken together, do not establish Argentine dominance. Argentina won 1998 on penalties. England won 2002 by a single goal. Across 210 minutes of football, the difference between the sides was a single penalty shoot-out and a single red card. The rivalry's weight in English football memory is disproportionate to the goal difference, and that disproportion is itself part of the story. The Guardian piece is useful precisely because it does not try to resolve it. It lets Simeone, Owen, and Hoddle keep their grievances, and leaves the reader to decide whether a draw in Saint-Étienne and a 1-0 win in Sapporo were really the hinges of an era, or simply two matches that happened to be played in a hot summer and a cold one.

The next time these sides meet at a World Cup, the same long read will be commissioned. The players who take the pitch will be under twenty-five. The interviews will be given by men in their fifties, the same way these were, and the same line about Beckham's kick and Simeone's scowl will appear in the second paragraph. The matches are old now, but the memory is not.

This piece treats the rivalry from the bench as much as from the stands, drawing on the Guardian's recent oral history rather than the English tabloid framing that has dominated previous retrospectives.