DESPITE what cynics blessed with the gift of twenty-twenty hindsight might have you believe, Pele’s suggestion that Colombia would at least make the semi-finals of USA 94 wasn’t a crazy shot in the dark.

Those would come later, six of them; bullets fired in a Medellín nightclub car park during a row that occurred in the early hours of July 2, 1994.

They would ring around the world, rendering millions incredulous that the captain of Colombia had been murdered, shot six times in the back, apparently as revenge for his contribution to his own team’s elimination from a World Cup that was not yet over. It seemed that for no crime more heinous than accidentally scoring an own goal during a football match, Andrés Escobar had been gunned down in cold blood.

El Caballero del Futbol, the gentleman of football, was a quiet, disciplined and much-loved leader of a golden generation of Colombian footballers who travelled to USA 94 having conceded only two goals in qualifying. Pele wasn’t delusional: they were genuine contenders.

In a final qualifier against Argentina which their hosts needed to win to ensure qualification, Colombia won 5-0 in Buenos Aires, earning a standing ovation from shocked home fans whose team were eventually forced to creep through the back door courtesy of a play-off win over Australia. In 26 matches leading up to USA 94, Colombia lost just once.

The other Escobar
Socially, it was also a time of terrible devastation and misery for Colombia. Medellín was in a state of emergency following the murder of Pablo Escobar, a namesake but no relation to Andrés and head of the multi-billion dollar Medellín drug cartel.

Despite his status as bloodthirsty gang lord, Escobar was beloved of his country’s many poor, for whom he provided employment and housing. He also built football pitches, lots of them, on which many of the stars who qualified so effortlessly for USA 94 honed their skills as young boys.

Escobar also owned the Medellín football team Atlético Nacional, where the sale of tickets for cash and decidedly creative book-keeping when it came to player transfers enabled him to launder hundreds of millions of dollars.

The wages paid encouraged Colombia’s finest players to remain at home, enabling Nacional to become South American club champions by winning the 1989 Copa Libertadores.

Their team featured Andrés Escobar in its line-up, among other home-based internationals who went go on to qualify for USA 94 with such distinction.

Responsible for the murder of assorted judges, politicians, over 500 policemen, at least one referee and thousands of rival cartel members who displeased him, Pablo Escobar had surrendered himself to Colombian authorities in the early 1990s, having first avoided attempts to extradite him to the USA.

Holed up in Catedral Prison on the outskirts of Medellín, which became his own personal fiefdom, he had been promised a reduced sentence if he agreed to cease trafficking drugs.

There he was visited by members of the Colombia football team, who would travel there in secret for kickabouts on the pitch Escobar had ordered to be built as a condition of his surrender.

Having escaped from prison and gone on the run after hearing the authorities were planning to move him to a stricter regime, on December 2 1993, one day after his 44th birthday, Pablo Escobar was murdered.

Following the death of Pablo Escobar, the infant son of the Colombia defender Luis ‘Chonto’ Herrera had been kidnapped and subsequently returned in Medellín.

A squad paralysed by fear
A frightened shadow of the fur coat-wearing maverick who later pitched up at Newcastle United, Faustino Asprilla remembered everyone at the meeting being “really tense”, paralysed by fear and with nobody saying a word.

Despite, or perhaps because of their terror, Colombia threw the kitchen sink at the USA from the start. In the 22nd minute, the psychological floodgates opened.

At full stretch in an effort to cut out a low, curling John Harkes cross into the penalty area from the inside left, Escobar made contact with the ball and sent it rolling past the hopelessly wrong-footed Córdoba and into his own goal.

Following a few seconds of quiet reflection as he lay flat on his back with his head in his hands contemplating the first own goal of his professional career, the stony-faced Escobar rose to his feet, glanced to his right and walked slowly towards the half-way line. If he was mulling over the seriousness of the possible consequences, he hid it fairly well.

He was certainly well-liked by his team-mates, who considered him blameless. The jig was all but up for Colombia: Earnie Stewart doubled the USA’s lead with a 52nd minute tap-in and that’s how it stayed until the final minute, when Valencia scored his second consolation goal of the tournament.

In the final round of group games, Colombia beat Switzerland 2-0 at the Stanford Stadium in Palo Alto, but the USA’s defeat at the hands of Romania meant their fate was sealed.

Escobar was devastated by Colombia’s World Cup exit and his very public contribution to it, a contribution he never watched on television.

Killed by football or society?
Escobar decided to go out with friends for the first time since his return from the World Cup and called Chonto Herrera to invite him along. Herrera told him to stay in, advising Escobar it would probably be best if they lie low. His manager shared Herrera’s concerns and told his player to be careful.

According to eye-witness reports, Escobar showed his face to the wrong people. Upon arriving at Medellín’s El Indio Bar with friends, the footballer enjoyed a few drinks and was happily talking to fellow revellers when a few people began insulting him, sarcastically cheering his error against the USA.

Escobar left the premises, but the four-strong group hurling abuse followed him, continued their tirade and loudly labelled him a ‘faggot’. Upset, Escobar drove his car across the car park in order to reason with his detractors, insisting his own goal had been “an honest mistake”.

An already tense situation escalated and at least one gun was produced and fired. Six bullets tore through the flesh and bone of Escobar’s back as he sat at the wheel of his car. An ambulance was called, but it was too late. Less than 30 minutes later, Andrés Escobar was declared dead.

In the wake of the shooting, which was and remains widely assumed to be a revenge slaying perpetrated by gangsters who had shipped heavy losses betting on Colombia at the World Cup, two people gave the licence plate number of one of the vehicles in which the group responsible for the murder made their escape.

It was registered to the Gallón brothers, Pedro and Juan, drug traffickers who had left Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel to join the Pepes. According to Jhon Jairo Velásquez Vásquez, an enforcer for Pablo Escobar currently in prison for 300 murders, immediately after the shooting, the Gallóns approached Carlos Castano and paid him $3M to buy off the prosecutor’s office and get them to focus their investigation on one of their bodyguards who had been present at the scene.

Whether or not he actually pulled the trigger remains unknown, but Humberto Castro Muñoz confessed to Escobar’s murder and was later sentenced to 43 years in prison, only to be released for good behaviour after serving just 11.

Weeping fans threw flowers in the path of the hearse as it passed with a police escort, while at the cemetery Colombia flags were waved by many of the 15 000 present to see Escobar’s coffin lowered into the ground.

Twenty years on, Andrés Escobar remains known around the world as the tragic Colombian footballer who was brutally “killed for scoring an own goal”. It’s a rather simplistic conclusion which his former manager feels does events of the time little justice.

Life doesn’t end here, wrote Escobar in what turned out to be his valedictory address to the people of Colombia. Instead, it ended somewhere else just a few days later – violently and senselessly in the seedy confines of a Medellín night club car park.