Alcides Edgardo Ghiggia (born 22 December 1926 in Montevideo, Uruguay) is a former football player. He achieved lasting fame due to his decisive role in the final match of the 1950 World Cup.
Ghiggia, an excellent dribbler on the right wing, 1,69 m short and 62 kg light, is considered one of the best wingers of the 1950s. The World Cup winner of 1950 played for the national sides of Uruguay and Italy. He also played for the club sides of the Peñarol and Danubio in Montevideo and AS Roma and AC Milan in Italy.
Club career
In 1948 Ghiggia got the opportunity to play for the Uruguayan top side CA Peñarol where was soon regarded indispensable. By 1949 he won his first national championship. A second one followed in 1951.
At the beginning of the European 1953/54 season Ghiggia moved to AS Roma in the Italian Serie A, where he was even team captain in 1957/58. With Roma he won the 1961 Inter-Cities Fairs Cup, the precursor to the UEFA Cup, albeit he took no part in the finals against Birmingham City. With almost 35 years of age he was then the oldest player of his team.
In eight seasons he played 201 Serie A matches for Roma scoring 15 goals. The best league ranking in this period was third place in 1955.
In 1961 he moved to AC Milan for a year and won the Scudetto, the Italian championship, with the rossoneri, albeit only playing four league matches in the whole season. After this he left Milan to return to his home country.
After his return to Montevideo Ghiggia joined the then minor first division club Danubio FC. Without adding to his collection of titles he eventually retired from the game in the late 1960s, aged 41.
International career
Uruguay
The right winger of CA Peñarol of Montevideo became a legend of Uruguayan and world football when he scored the decisive goal in the de-facto final of the World Cup 1950 in the Maracanã Stadium of Rio de Janeiro in front of a crowd of about 200,000 against the highly fancied home side Brazil.
The hosts only needed a draw to secure the world title and well into the second half led the match 1-0. After about an hour Uruguay managed to equalise through a goal by Juan Alberto Schiaffino, but it was Ghiggia ten minutes before the end who sent South America's largest nation into collective misery when he overcame Brazil's goalkeeper Barbosa, who in the eyes of some, looked not at his very best in this situation.
In Brazilian folklore this match remains alive as the Maracanaço.
Roberto Muylaert, the biographer of the Brazilian goalkeepper, compares the black and white film of this goal with Abraham Zapruder's chance images of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas. The goal and the shot that killed the US President have "the same dramatic pattern… the same movement… the same precision of an unstoppable trajectory…. They even have the dust in common that was stirred up, here by a rifle and there by Ghiggia's left foot."
Moacir Barbosa, who was blamed for the defeat and especially Ghiggia's goal was to suffer for a long time in the aftermath of this match. Life became a torture for him. In 2000, shortly before his death, he said in an interview: "The maximum punishment in Brazil is 30 years imprisonment, but I have been paying, for something I am not even responsible for, by now for 50 years."
Ghiggia was amazed when he travelled to Brazil half a century after the event and a female customs officer in her twenties asked him if he were the Ghiggia. Ghiggia answered, "yes, but all that happened 50 years ago". She replied: "we in Brazil still feel this moment as if it were today".
In the course of the 1950 World Cup tournament Ghiggia scored a goal in each of his matches. Those four goals remained the only ones scored in his total 12 matches played for Uruguay between 1950 and 1952.
Italy
After Ghiggia became a naturalized Italian citizen in 1957 he played between 1957-1959 for the national side of his adopted country. Three matches he played in the course of the ill-fated qualification for the World Cup 1958 in Sweden when Italy failed for the first time to make it to the final tournament of a World Cup. In his altogether five matches for Italy he scored one goal.
