When Radamel Falcao rippled the net in Colombia’s group stage win against Poland, memories of the striker at his peak came flooding back. The anticipation, the touch, the finish, the speed of thought and deed; this was the talisman who led Porto to a domestic and European treble, the human wrecking ball who demolished Chelsea with a hat-trick for Atletico Madrid in the Uefa Super Cup. It was not the player who left England two years ago with his career on the line, the paling shadow who managed only five goals in 36 Premier League appearances for Manchester United and Chelsea before returning to Monaco unsure of his future.
At that stage, moments such as the one Falcao seized in Kazan were a distant dream. He had been cruelly denied a place at the 2014 World Cup due to the knee injury he sustained halfway through his first season at Monaco, when he was sent crashing to the turf in a Coupe de France tie against fourth division Monts D’or Azergues. It is a measure of the man that in the aftermath of that incident, in the darkest moments when his chance of playing at a first World Cup appeared to have been snatched away, he reached out to Soner Ertek, the defender left distraught by the damage his tackle had caused. “Don’t blame yourself,” wrote Falcao. “Accidents happen in football.”
The repercussions of this accident were enduring. Falcao watched from the sidelines as a free-spirited Colombian side imbued with a sense of destiny reached the quarter-finals in Brazil. He moved to Manchester under Louis van Gaal but started only 14 matches in the league, his personal struggles put into sharp focus when he lasted only an hour in FA Cup fixtures against Yeovil and Preston. It was the same story at Chelsea. After a solitary strike in a home defeat to Crystal Palace in August, he was rarely seen beyond the training pitches at Cobham, wondering whether, at 30 years of age, it was all over.