My Favourite Game: when Denmark beat Uruguay 6-1 at the 86 World Cup

08-Jun-2020 14:47:29 | The Guardian

For an eight-year-old who was experiencing his first World Cup, this was like watching football through a kaleidoscope

Your first World Cup is an experience that stays with you forever. Like the first film you saw at the cinema or the first single you bought, it’s part of a range of formative cultural experiences that help draft the early sketches of the person you will become. As the pioneer, it also offers the visceral thrill of the unknown in a way later tournaments can never quite replicate.

I was just shy of nine years old at the time of the 1986 World Cup in Mexico. The kick-off times at that tournament had been scheduled with a European audience in mind, but one with a much later bedtime than I had. My parents had rented a VCR just before that tournament, which removed that problem for me; matches could be recorded overnight and then replayed for my entertainment the following day. One of the first matches captured for future viewing was Denmark against Uruguay in Group E.