Goals are football’s very currency and, as such, it should come as no surprise that the names of Muller, Kempes, Ronaldo and Rossi are woven into the fabric of this great tournament. Indeed, the list of top scorers at previous FIFA World Cups™ reads like a who’s who of the game’s all-time great marksmen, with Argentina’s Guillermo Stabile leading in 1930 where the likes of Leonidas da Silva, Just Fontaine and Eusebio would stylishly follow. For strikers at South Africa 2010, the challenge is to join this pantheon of goalscoring legends.
With FIFA World Cup immortality at stake, the prize is undeniably attractive, and while most harbour the ambition secretly, others have spoken openly of coveting the adidas Golden Boot. It is now three months since Gonzalo Higuain declared that “my dream is to be the top scorer at the World Cup,” and the good news for the Argentina No9 is that he has taken an significant step towards realising that ambition.
After a tense opening round of matches unique for the fact that no individual player scored more than once, it was Higuain – with the first FIFA World Cup hat-trick in eight years – who effectively fired the starter’s gun in the race to finish as South Africa 2010’s top scorer. The Real Madrid striker still leads that particular pursuit, in fact, but even at this stage he is not without some formidable rivals.
Arguably chief among them is Luis Fabiano, whose reaction to scoring twice against Cote d’Ivoire was to declare himself a “dark horse” in the chase to catch and pass Higuain. In the build-up to the tournament, the Brazil centre-forward had pinpointed three main rivals, while also confirming his own ambitions. “[Wayne] Rooney and [David] Villa are players that can fight for the Golden Boot,” he said. “Lionel Messi will also score a lot of goals – and I hope to be among them as well.”
While Rooney and Messi have struggled to justify this faith, Villa – the third member of Luis Fabiano’s star trio – did inch closer to Higuain with a brace against Honduras. The Spain striker would even have moved joint-top of the scoring charts had it not been for a missed penalty in the same match, although that is unlikely to dent his self-belief. “It would be great to be top scorer here,” Villa has admitted. “With the quality we have in playing the final ball, I could do it.”