A few days ago I read that Zidane is now coaching France, and I have been thinking about him since. Mostly about how difficult it is to hold two true things about one person at the same time.

France has always been my team, and Zidane is one of the very few footballers I have felt any real fondness for. Not admiration exactly, but fondness, which is slower and much harder to argue away. I still pull up the two headers against Brazil in 1998, and I still watch the way he moved with the ball, as though he and the ball had come to some private arrangement.

Which is exactly why I have no interest in softening what he did in 2006.

It was the 110th minute of the World Cup final, the last match he would ever play, and he walked up to Marco Materazzi and put his head into his chest in front of most of the planet. He was sent off. France finished with ten men and lost on penalties. Something was said about his mother or his sister. Nobody has ever fully settled what. The provocation was almost certainly real, but provocation explains a thing without excusing it. He lost his head, walked into precisely the trap the other side had set for him, and left ten men to finish the biggest night of their lives without their captain.

And then he was named the best player of the tournament anyway.

The world had two facts in front of it and could not carry both, so it took the more comfortable one and let the trophy stand. He was the finest player of that tournament. He also disgraced its final. Neither of those makes the other smaller.

What I have never understood is the instinct to defend it. The justifications are always hollow, and they treat a grown man and a captain as somebody who simply could not help himself. He is owed better than that. Holding him responsible is the more respectful position, not the crueller one. His teammates held him to it, and they were the ones who had to play out that final without him.

The opposite instinct is no better. For some, the headbutt is now the only thing Zidane is, an entire career filed under its worst moment. One side can’t stand the offence, so it explains it away. The other can’t stand the greatness, so it pretends it was never there.

None of it costs me the fondness, which is the part people seem least able to believe.

My son is named Zidane, and he was born on the same day as the man himself. He is far too young for any of this. But when he is old enough to ask about the name, I want to give him both halves in the same breath: that the man he is named after played football like nobody else alive, and that he ended his career by losing his temper in front of the entire world, and that neither fact cancels the other.