Patrick Vieira’s eyes mist over as he talks about what it took to win the World Cup with France in 1998. He touches upon Zinedine Zidane’s brilliance but the theme he keeps coming back to is togetherness: not so much liberté, egalité, fraternité as unité, humilité, fraternité.Casting his mind back to that glorious summer, he talks of a team swept along on a tide of national fervour as tournament hosts. But he also points to the individuals within the group — Didier Deschamps, Marcel Desailly, Laurent Blanc, Lilian Thuram, Bixente Lizarazu, Youri Djorkaeff — and how, when they rallied together, they became far greater than the sum of their parts.“Before the tournament, no one believed in us,” the former France midfielder says. “There was no belief from the people or the media that we would have a good World Cup. But once we came out of the group stage, we started to feel the passion and the belief from the fans. Even when we were at Clairefontaine (French football’s base near Paris), just watching on the TV, because we were in our bubble, we could feel the belief from the people.“Everything gelled together and we managed to build that momentum. Luck was sometimes on our side — the golden goal we scored against Paraguay (in the last 16), the (quarter-final) penalty shootout against Italy — but in those moments, it was also about that team spirit, that togetherness. Arriving at the quarter-final and the semi-finals, it was like: ‘There is only one way to go — to the end’.”They beat Brazil so comprehensively in the final that the closing stages, in which Vieira came off the bench to set up his Arsenal team-mate Emmanuel Petit to wrap up a 3-0 victory in added time, felt like a procession.“I remember Deschamps, Thuram, in the dressing room giving the feeling that nothing could happen to us because you had the positive energy around you and you knew that the performance would be happening,” he says. “In the final against Brazil, I felt our teeth were longer than theirs. I think we wanted it more. I couldn’t see how we were not going to win.”France’s victorious players celebrate World Cup success in 1998, with Patrick Vieira in their midst (Richard Sellers/Sportsphoto/Allstar via Getty Images)That French idiom about having long teeth — les dents longues — can have negative connotations about a person’s ambitious streak. But Vieira means it in the best possible way. “Players who had experience and that nastiness,” he says with a smile. “Warrior players who would pull their sleeves up and just go for it.”Naturally, the conversation drifts to the present and the question of whether today’s France team, having lost on penalties to Argentina in the most recent World Cup final four years ago, has the quality, the mentality and the togetherness to go one step further this time and emulate their predecessors’ triumphs in 1998 and 2018?A pause.“They have, certainly, the individual talent to go to the end,” Vieira says. “But individual talent is not going to be enough. I think the biggest challenge for the French team is how they will gel together, (whether) the togetherness will be strong enough to help them go through those difficult periods and how (Kylian) Mbappe, as a captain, as a leader, will be the positive guy to bring the team together.