I played with Thierry Henry and Frank Lampard, Eric Cantona struck fear into rivals but Zinedine Zidane was the best – mesmerising team talk won us World Cup
Emmanuel Petit says Zinedine Zidane delivered the greatest team talk of his career during the 1998 World Cup final.
The France and Real Madrid legend scored twice against Brazil with Petit grabbing the third as Le Bleus made history in Paris to win the biggest prize in world football on home soil.
Zidane will go down as one of the greatest players of all time. There is a host of legendary names who will admit as much from Ronaldinho, who said he was an idol of his, to Zlatan Ibrahimovic and the late Franz Beckenbauer, with Petit acknowledging he was the best player he ever played with and against.
And being a man of few words it meant that when the player affectionately known as 'Zizou' by his teammates spoke, people listened.
Speaking to Andy Goldstein and Darren Bent on talkSPORT Drive, Petit recalled half-time inside the French changing room at the Stade de France in 1998. «He never talks, but in the World Cup final we were so excited and winning the tie 2-0 and were so close to touching the trophy.
“I remember the manager Aime Jacquet smashing the table, he’d never done that before and said, ‘calm down, we’re just at half-time and must come back onto the pitch with the feeling that it’s 0-0’.
“Then Zizou spoke, like [captain] Didier Deschamps and just said a few words. Because he never talks, that was important for us.
“We needed our leader to have some words because we were losing the plot. We were leading the score and so excited that we could have lost the game.»
Asked what Zidane said, Petit recalled: «I can’t remember, but just a few words to say concentrate on what we are doing.
»He just said ‘we were so close to making history. You have no idea. Thousands of peoples – hundreds of thousands of people in history have
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