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One of the smaller, yet still very pleasing features of the great 1982 World Cup was that even the goal celebrations had a poetic quality. The joy of successfully channelling a lifetime of aspiration into a single glorious kick has never been better expressed than it was by Marco Tardelli after he scored Italy's second in the final; the awesome beauty and menace with which Brazil played in the tournament was captured magnificently by Socrates' mimed volcanic eruption after his exquisite strike against the Soviet Union; and the reaction to Luis Ramírez Zapata's goal for El Salvador against Hungary gave dramatic expression to an extraordinary tale – of horror, farce and, despite everything, triumph.
When Ramírez swept the ball into the Hungarian net in the 64th minute of their opening match of the tournament, he charged away in uncontainable ecstasy before eventually being engulfed by four equally delighted team-mates. We know his ecstasy was uncontainable because several other team-mates tried to contain it. "Several of them told me not to celebrate," Ramírez later admitted. "They were afraid that it would make Hungary angry and we would concede more goals. But I was happy and I celebrated as if I'd put us into the lead." Which, of course, he had not. He had merely cut the deficit to 5-1. Whether because they were piqued or just because they could, Hungary hit back five times, inflicting a 10-1 defeat that remains the heaviest in World Cup history. What Ramírez had scored was the ultimate consolation goal.
Just as Mwepu Ilunga's infamous decision to rush out of the Zaire wall and boot the ball away before Brazil could take a free-kick in the 1974 World Cup was not, contrary to widespread ignorant interpretation at the time, a case of African naivety, Ramírez's jubilation was not the action of a man to whom personal gratification counted more than national humiliation, nor of a simpleton who did not properly understand the context. Quite the opposite. Ramírez went into raptures because he had ensured that he and his compatriots made a positive imprint on the global consciousness at a time when El Salvador was known mostly for gore.
In 1969 the so-called 'Soccer War' broke out between El Salvador and Honduras when a World Cup qualifier gave a pretext for a dispute over land policy to be escalated into armed conflict. The fighting lasted only four days. The Salvadoran civil war, which started a decade later, went on for much longer and was characterised by torture, death squads and ruin. Brutal government forces backed by a United States administration in the grip of cold war mania fought with left-wing guerrilla groups. Civilians suffered terribly. The ramshackle infrastructure of Central America's smallest country was devastated. Qualification for the 1982 World Cup was far from a priority and nowhere near likely.
Even from a purely sporting viewpoint El Salvador's chances of reaching Spain looked slim. The finals of the 1981 Concacaf championship, hosted by Honduras, doubled as the region's last qualification round. It took the form of a six-team league and Mexico, led by the Atlético Madrid star Hugo Sánchez, were expected to ease to the top. The hosts were second favourites and El Salvador's hopes of springing a surprise looked doomed when they were beaten by Canada in their first game.
In their next match, however, El Salvador produced a sensation, subduing the vaunted Mexican attack before striking on the counter in the 81st minute through Ever Francisco Hernández. They then beat Haiti and drew with Cuba and Honduras to finish second in the table behind the hosts. They were on their way to the World Cup for only the second time in the country's history: the first time was in 1970, where they suffered a controversial defeat to Mexico, who opened the scoring after taking a free-kick that had been awarded to El Salvador (prompting Salvadoran players to spend minutes protesting and then, with fabulous bolshiness, boot the ball straight into the stands straight from the ensuing kick-off). They lost all three matches in the tournament. Without scoring a goal.
El Salvador's preparations for their trip to Spain were, of course, hampered by the war that was devastating the country. They struggled to arrange friendlies and training sessions were frequently disrupted. "If some of us arrived late, it was because we had to assist wounded people abandoned alongside the road," the defender Francisco Jovel told the journalist Martin Mazur in an article for FourFourTwo. In the same article, the midfielder Mauricio Alfaro explains one of the reasons why, no matter the obstacles, the players were determined to play on. "All we know is that when we played the qualifiers, we made the killings from both factions cease. The people united for at least one day. That was our greatest gift, the country was in deep suffering and we had the pressure of trying to reduce it."
Hungary's Imre Garaba easily evades a desperate challenge from Jaime Rodríguez of El Salvador. Photograph: Staedele/ Staedele/dpa/Corbis
"El Salvador had a very good preparatory programme, mainly with the emphasis on endurance, speed and strength," said Fifa's technical report on the 1982 World Cup before explaining, with the sort of understatement that only a seasoned bureaucrat could emit: "but, as it happened, the special political circumstances in the country prevented the final stage from being carried out in as concentrated a way as one would have actually wished."
Corruption and incompetence brought further complications for the Salvadoran players. The youngest squad in Spain, they were also the last to arrive for the finals, landing just three days before the clash with Hungary after a three day journey that included a stopover to play a friendly against a Brazilian club side. And the squad contained just 20 players rather than the permitted 22 because officials decided to bring along a couple of extra cronies instead. The players were outraged when they found out and tried to raise funds to bring their two jettisoned team-mates, Gilberto Quinteros and Miguel González, but, with all but one of them amateurs, they could not find enough money.
Nor did they have enough tracksuits, as some of the ones issued to them went missing. Nor did they have enough balls: Fifa had supplied 25 of the new Tango España balls to each participating nation but none of the ones allocated to El Salvador made it as far as the players, who had to ask Hungary to lend them a couple so they could practise before their first match. Eager to project the positive side of their country, the players were especially angry that they did not even have a pennant with which to perform the traditional exchange with opponents before kick-off. Their 20-year-old goalkeeper Luis Guevara Mora decided to improvise. "When we arrived, we saw that all the other teams had brought gifts for their opponents, shirts, flags and even a book relating the history of football in their country. As for us, we hadn't brought anything," he recalled in 2007. "Then I spotted a pine tree and cut a piece of wood from it, into which I carved the words 'El Salvador'. And that's what we gave them."
A survey conducted by a Salvadoran radio station found that more than 60% of respondents predicted a Salvadoran victory in their first match. The players, meanwhile, did not know much about their opponents. Hungary had topped England's qualifying group despite losing home and away to Ron Greenwood's men, but all that the Salvadoran players had seen of them was on a short video that they bought from a Spanish agent the day before their tournament debut. Several of them later admitted that they were surprised before kick-off to see how tall the Hungarian players were. Not being forewarned, El Salvador were not at all forearmed. Hungary did not rack up the biggest win in World Cup history because El Salvador were the worst team ever to reach the finals; rather, they were the happy beneficiaries of a monumentally ill-conceived tactical plan.
At 36, Mauricio "Pipo" Rodríguez was the youngest manager at the finals and he sent his team out to dazzle the world with their attacking flair. They went gung-ho from the start and the folly of that approach rapidly became clear, as Tibor Nyilasi, a wily striker making his 50th appearance for Hungary, nodded in the first goal in the fourth minute. Gabor Poloskei struck the second in the 11th minute, taking advantage of the positioning of Mora, who, in his only really awful mistake in the game, completely lost his bearings as the forward bore down on him. Laszlo Fazekas soon made it 3-0 with a fine long-range strike. Rodríguez decided something had to be done. He made a substitution after just 27 minutes.
Laszlo Fazekas jumps on Gabor Poloskei after he put Hungary 3-0 up against El Salvador. Photograph: AP
The change was not intended to limit the damage – instead, Rodríguez reckoned a comeback was still on the cards. He introduced a forward, Ramírez, for the midfielder José Luis Rugama. Rodríguez had barely used Ramírez during the qualifiers but had come under immense pressure from fans to bring the player nicknamed 'El Pelé' to the World Cup. Now was his chance to shine. And his introduction did initially reverse the flow of the play, as he combined with the team's only professional, Jorge Alberto "El Mágico" González to force the Hungarian goalkeeper, Ferenc Meszaros, into a couple of decent saves before the break.
At half-time Hungary's manager, Kalman Meszoly, berated his players for their complacency, warning the game was not over. In the 50th minute, however, Hungary again revelled in the vast spaces left by El Salvador's roving wing-backs and increased the toll to 4-0. Rodríguez realised his team were just too ragged and were now at risk of a rout. He feared for Mora, in particular, so asked the reserve goalkeeper to warm up but Eduardo Hernández refused. "We didn't argue about it," said Rodríguez. "I had wanted to protect Mora from conceding more goals but then I realised that I risked ruining two goalkeepers' confidence on the same day so I left Mora in." In the 55th minute Mora was beaten at the near post as Fazekas made it 5-0.
El Salvador kept attacking when they could. Their quixotic charm enchanted most of the 23,000 crowd in Elche, who willed them on loudly, becoming especially giddy whenever "El Mágico" got the ball. The forward had thrilled with his dribbling throughout the game and, in the 64th minute, he feinted past two defenders and cut into the Hungarian box before pulling the ball back to Silvo Aquino. The midfielder rather scuffed his shot but it fell to Ramírez, who controlled the ball six yards from goal and then swivelled and slotted it into the net. Off he hurtled in exultation, his team-mates haring after him, some rejoicing with him, others begging him to calm down. He had just scored a tiny, war-ravaged country's first goal at the World Cup, giving a sliver of lustre to the name of a nation that the planet's media had been depicting as entirely blood-drenched, but he was asked to show some decorum. There were, after all, still 26 minutes to endure.
The dreaded backlash soon began. Within five minutes Laszlo Kiss was allowed to trap a ball from a corner and turn eight yards from the Salvadoran goal before firing past Mora to make it 6-1. Kiss had only entered as a substitute in the 55th minute, having been originally omitted because his manager accused him of being out of shape. Two minutes later another substitute, Lazar Szentes, tapped into the net from close range to make it 7-1. By now Salvadoran defenders, forsaken as their team-mates were continually stranded upfield, were seriously panicking. They hurled themselves into tackles that were easily sidestepped by their opponents, whose greater poise was summed up by the sumptuous Kiss lob that made the score 8-1. Kiss completed his seven-minute hat-trick when Mora, just as Luis Arconada would do 10 days later against Northern Ireland, palmed a cross into an opponent's path. Fittingly, the unique figure of 10 was reached when Nyilasi rounded off the scoring in the same way as it had started, planting an unhindered header into the net from close range.
The Salvadoran players were pained by the humiliation. Three of them, Jovel, Norberto Huezo and Ramón Fagoaga, effectively overthrew the manager and announced they would determine the tactics for the next two matches, which, ominously, were against two even more formidable opponents: Belgium and the reigning champions Argentina. First, however, the players' shattered confidence needed rebuilding – seeing this the next day, the waiters in their hotel offered to play them in a training game. Rather than dwell on their failure, El Salvador took up the waiters' challenge and whopped them. But even the interaction with the staff was not hassle free: when one of the waiters found out that the footballers had given him an unflattering nickname, he confronted them angrily. The hotel manager then sacked the waiter for being rude to the guests. Appalled, the Salvadoran squad threatened to go on hunger strike until the waiter was reinstated.
While the players were plotting their approach to the Belgium match, where they were adamant that they would be more solid, a local radio ham regularly visited the team hotel to keep them abreast of developments back home. Hearts hung lower when they heard that a minor earthquake had wrought further damage on their country.
Four days after the humiliation by Hungary, El Salvador showed their new-found resolve against Belgium, whose manager, Guy Thys, had branded their performance in the first match as "the most shameful" ever in the World Cup. The Central Americans displayed a sounder structure, with the wing-backs helping the three centre-backs and the midfield providing protection too, and Mora suggested that he bore no ill-effects from his torment in Elche by producing a phenomenal one-handed save to deny Erin Vandenbergh early on. Unfortunately, Mora looked rather less accomplished in the 19th minute, when he was confused by a swerving Ludo Coeck shot from 35 yards which opened the scoring. But El Salvador did not crumble and instead worked diligently to prevent the Belgians from adding to their tally.
Their resistance was even more admirable against Argentina, with Mora again making a couple of excellent stops before being beaten by a first-half penalty from Daniel Passarella. Daniel Bertoni made it 2-0 with a lovely finish in the second half after weaving his way past three defenders but El Salvador restricted the Argentinians to few chances, notably stifling Diego Maradona, and even worried their illustrious opponents a couple of times on the break. Mágico González, indeed, was so impressive going forward that after the tournament he was signed by Cádiz, where he spent nearly 10 years and is still regarded as the best player in that club's history. Maradona offered even higher praise, once heralding El Mágico as "one of the 10 best players I have ever seen". El Salvador, you see, really did have some good players.
Even El Salvador's one superstar, Jorge Alberto 'El Mágico' González, left, cannot get close to Hungary's Gabor Poloskei. Photograph: Staedel/ Staedel/dpa/Corbis
Even Mora, who was lambasted back home and received threats of violence upon his return, demonstrated enough quality in Spain to convince Real Murcia to award him a contract. He lasted only a year there before moving to the United States for a short spell and then rejoining a club in El Salvador, where, he said, it was at least another five years before he felt comfortable among his people. Many of his team-mates felt the same, as the men who had gone to Spain as heroes were shunned on their return. Rodríguez never coached again.
As time passed, the players were judged less harshly. In 2007, to mark the 25th anniversary of the match, the Salvadoran Football Association decided to celebrate the team's achievements rather than wallow in their one misadventure. A friendly against Hungary was arranged to commemorate the occasion, featuring several of the players who had made the Elche meeting so memorable. Hungary took a two-goal lead before, fittingly, Ramírez came off the bench to restore Salvadoran pride, this time scoring not once but twice. "The draw meant a great deal to us, psychologically speaking," said a visibly moved, 49-year-old El Mágico. "It was wonderful to finally be able to make it up to our supporters."
