Regardless of how irksome and tiresome international football can be, with it's disruptive international breaks that force unwanted pauses in the Premier League schedule and, sometimes, rob Everton of vital players, the World Cup Finals, when they eventually roll around, can be intoxicating. A month-long feast of football bringing together some of the planet's best players in a melange of contrasting cultures and styles, the quadrennial tournament serves as a temporal marker along the life journey of a football fan.

The 1986 World Cup will always occupy a special place in my heart. It was the first following the advent of my footballing consciousness earlier that year and there are many moments indelibly imprinted in the memory — Josimar letting fly from miles out against Northern Ireland, Negrete's sublime scissor kick, Preben Elkjaer's virtuoso striking performance, the deluge of goals in the quarter-final between the Soviet Union and Belgium, and, of course, the five-goal final, to name a few.

My experience of the tournament, however, was largely framed by England's campaign: The slow start; pride in Gary Lineker but frustration at the initial marginalisation of the rest of the Everton contingent; and the pain and anger at the Hand of God goal that knocked Bobby Robson's team out.

The 1990 Finals were something else altogether. Four years older, a good deal wiser and more enthusiastic about the professional game, I took in the tournament in Italy in a much more holistic manner. As is the case today, I remember wanting to absorb as much of it as I could, immersing myself in the machinations of each group, marvelling at hitherto unknown players and picking my favourites, all the while willing England's progress to its ultimately heart-breaking conclusion at the semi-final stage in Turin.

I followed the national team that summer with almost the same zeal as I did Everton — I said almost! — and despite another uninspiring start to the group phase, their story developed into an exciting narrative that gripped the nation like never before. Perhaps for that reason alone, plus the fact that it would be another eight years before England would feature in the Finals again, the 1990 World Cup was always destined to be an especially memorable one.

Of course, while the football itself didn't always inspire — it had the lowest goals-per-game ratio of any Finals before or since and the final between West Germany and Argentina is regarded as the worst ever — Italia '90 turned out to be a landmark tournament in so many ways; a watershed between the vintage tournaments of old and a modern phenomenon tailored to a global televised audience played out against a backdrop of seismic change.

It was difficult to fully appreciate living through it at the time, particularly as a teenager given more to dividing his time between computer games on the one hand and playing football until it was too dark to continue on the other, but both the world — Eastern Europe in particular — and the game of football itself were in the throes of irrevocable change around the time of the World Cup in Italy.

Communism was collapsing across the Eastern Bloc. Mere months before the finals took place, the Berlin Wall had fallen, Ceausescu was dead and Czechoslovakia had witnessed the Velvet Revolution. A few more months after its conclusion, Germany was officially reunified and the following year, the Soviet Union had been dissolved and Yugoslavia was rushing headlong into a conflict that would lead to further Balkanisation of that country.

Closer to home, the unexpected progress of Ireland had seen the people of that country rediscover a measure of unity around the tricolour that had been strained at the height of the troubles and the IRA.

The English game, meanwhile, was emerging from the nadir of hooliganism on the Continent following the Heysel tragedy and the five-year ban that followed into a post-Hillsborough world, with the changes mandated by the Justice Taylor Report one of the many facets of the Premier League revolution that was to come.

This confluence of revolutions in football and geopolitics is unparalleled and makes for the subject of the fascinating work that is Simon Hart's new book, World In Motion — The Inside Story Of Italia '90, The Tournament That Changed Football.

Had he merely decided to recount the on- and off-field events and describe their lasting effects, that would surely have made for an engaging retrospective on its own. Instead, however, Simon travelled the globe to get the first-person perspectives of some of the many protagonists that illuminated the tournament themselves and he weaves together their narratives, all the while describing how many of them were affected by the transformative winds of change that were blowing through the game and the world at large at that time.

From Roger Milla and the unbridled Cameroonians who crashed into the tournament like a freight train in that memorable opening game and the boom-and-bust fairytale that was Toto Schillaci to Sergio Goycochea, the goalkeeping hero of an Argentina team that limped — almost literally in the case of Diego Maradona — into the final, and Colombia's flamboyant goalkeeper Rene Higuita, there are the personal vignettes from players who left an indelible mark on Italia '90.

Then there are the stories behind those which played out on the pitch from the likes of German winger Pierre Littbarski, Romanian striker Florin Rà£ducioiu, Soviet defender Vagiz Khidiatullin, Dragan Stojković, and Czechoslovak star Ivo Knoflíček who experienced historic political change in their home countries while the fall of the Iron Curtain and burgeoning globalisation of football transfers opened up unprecedented avenues to players from the Eastern Bloc.

And then, of course, there are the contrasting fortunes of the teams from the British Isles who featured in Italy that year — Scotland who bombed out in heart-breaking fashion in the group phase; Ireland who surprised themselves as much as anybody else by progressing to the knockout phase; and England who went as far in a World Cup as they had managed since winning it in 1966 before suffering agony from the penalty spot in a manner that would become horribly familiar in subsequent tournaments.

There is so much magic woven into the tapestry of every World Cup in terms of what happens on the field. To have so many of the various back stories behind the 1990 Finals brought to life as vividly and extensively in which Simon does provides so much context and brings back so many memories of a pivotal tournament.

“World In Motion” was more than just a World Cup song for England in 1990; whether fascinatingly prescient or mere coincidence (this retrospective in The Independent doesn't hint at any nod towards the shifting tectonic plates of geo-politics) it could have been the slogan for an era. It is, therefore, the perfect title for this book!

Whether you lived through it or not but are enjoying the 2018 edition of the World Cup Finals in Russia and have an interest in the history of the game, it's a highly recommended read.

World In Motion is available for purchase now from deCoubertin Books, priced £16.99


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