Zinedine Zidane was red carded during the final overtime for head-butting Italian player Marco Materrazi. This has created a permanent blot on the glorious career of the great French player. We may never know what enraged Zidane so much as to throw his reputation and possibly the World Cup away. I was fishing around for any information out there for the cause of Zidane's rage and one common rumor going around is Marco pinched Zidane's nipple and directed some racial slur towards him.
I found this from an article in Observer written in 2004: "Zidane's family are Algerian immigrants, so-called beurs (French slang for Arabs), and he describes himself as 'a non-practising Muslim.... The Berbers are not Arabs and in recent years the Berbers from the Kabylie region of Algeria, which is Zidane's family's home territory, have been in open conflict with the Algerian government. There are rumours of massacre and counter-massacre, but all that is really known in the West is that more than 100,000 people have lost their lives in the civil war that has devastated the country since 1992." The complete article can be read at http://observer.guardian.co.uk/osm/story/0,,1182707,00.html
It may turn out that this was all planned by Marco and some of his team mates to take Zidane out of the eventual PK shootout. In any case this shows Zidane was only human and may not be fit for the demigod status he enjoyed for so many years. What a way to end a glorious career !
