On the evening of June 14, 1982, all broadcasts from the World Cup in Spain were interrupted to announce the ending of the Falklands war.

The euphoric tone of my response to that intrusion was accentuated, shortly after, by witnessing a goal of such verve and control, that it seemed as if it had been rehearsed to coincide with a nation's immediate outpouring of relief and jubilation.

It seemed to mirror historic events. Brazil were suffering the indignity of trailing 1-0 to the Soviet Union; a side of such stereotyped movement that you would have thought they were playing for the Lenin Award for Productivity. The Brazilians had mounted a siege after half-time, flamboyant but ineffectual. Then the ball fell to the feet of a tall, erect, bearded figure with flowing hair, and a pace that was almost indecently casual, but with the self-assuredness of an RSM among recruits. He ambled through the dense thicket of defenders before sending a curved shot high into the net. The foot, the balance, the classic athleticism all belonged to Socrates.

This almost emblematic goal was the signal for his side to go on to triumph in that game. It was the kind of contribution to the tournament that everyone, outside the Kremlin, had prayed for him to make, because he was representing a Brazilian side which had vowed to redeem their reputation from being too Europeanised in 1974 in Germany and unable to shrug off that clinging accusation in 1978 in Argentina.

But the fact that we poured into the Brazil training camp, to seek him out above all others, was not because of his avowal to head a renaissance of traditional Brazilian football but because he was, by conventional standards, something akin to a freak. We had heard about his smoking, his guitar playing, his fondness for a cognac, his admiration of Che Guevara and the fact that he could take out the appendix of any pressman present with a butter knife, if he so wished. So we approached him with a degree of wonderment, like kids desperate to find out if the bearded lady at the circus was real or not.

The reality, indeed, was that as he talked, you became aware you were in the presence of someone who had prioritised his life's interests and passions in such a way that made this whole World Cup business seem like an exotic distraction that had to be dispensed with quickly before getting on with things that really mattered. We lapped this up, as, in the first place, nobody is ever unsympathetic to Brazilian football, and here we were watching him strum his guitar for the cameras to remind us that football need not necessarily swamp all your senses.

Before the Scotland game in Seville, Jock Stein had reminded us all of the greatness of this man, but at the same time he had this nagging feeling that the Brazilians might be self-indulgent, to prove their authenticity. He was proved right, eventually, but not against a Scotland side which had the temerity to go one up against them, after which Socrates in midfield sprayed searing passes right, left and centre, without apparently breaking into a sweat and installing himself unquestionably as the guarantor of their great tradition. That night we embraced the belief that all's well with the world, for although we suffered a heavy defeat, it was at the hands of a side captained by a man who had taken us back to the time when Pele had held court and which, you could argue, is the baseline from which all great football stems.

But we over-romanticised this. Against Italy in the final game of the second round, Socrates led a side which decided that they can sometimes be the Harlem Globetrotters of football, with him as a somewhat more studious Meadowlark Lemon. He scored a marvellous goal from an almost impossibly narrow angle, off a deep run, but his celebration suggested the game was theirs. Aided by desperately poor defending, the Italians let them show off, then put them to the sword, leaving many of us feeling we had been cheated out of witnessing some great accomplishment.

Thus, we looked forward to Mexico in 1986 to see some resurgence. But Socrates hardly registered. He looked slower, duller and heavier, and I recall watching his last kick in a World Cup, in the penalty shoot-out in the famous game with France. His shot, saved by the goalkeeper, was tepid; like an end-of-era effort, as if he were relinquishing the crown to the new star of the show, Michel Platini.

Ultimately, though, Socrates stamped many great flowing images on the memory, and if there is such a thing as poetry in motion then he was certainly the composer of perfect rhyming ballads.