by admin | Nov 9, 2022 | Oskar Beck EN, World Cup
The match of the century celebrates its anniversary. Football has never been more wonderful and terrible than on 17 June 1970: In the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City, they put the arm in the noose of our maimed emperor, and at home we felt like being roped – the screams of joy from the neighbouring balconies became too unbearable as the night wore on.
A few days ago, the head of the sports desk tested my long-term memory and my aptitude for the following text with the question: “Where were you on 17 June 1970?”
All of us know these historical interrogations. Where were you when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon? Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell? Where were you when the planes flew into the Twin Towers in Manhattan?
Where was I on 17 June 1970?
At home in my television chair, like every dutiful German, I was alternately roaring with happiness and cursing with rage.
It was fifty years ago, but I can still see my father in front of me, clutching his heart in the middle of extra time and saying, “I have to go to bed, I can’t take this.” Then he fled, leaving me alone with this most wonderful and terrible football match the world has ever seen.
You have to be Italian not to have suffered permanent psychological damage that night. We Germans will never come to terms with this World Cup semi-final in Mexico City, which began as football and ended as torture. We are like Gerd Müller, who lay on the grass of the Aztec stadium at the end and swore: “I don’t want to see any more of this game for the rest of my life. I would cry.”
Triumph and tragedy have never come closer than on that night. Emotions rode roller coasters and ghost trains, and the incomprehensible is immortalised at the Azteca Stadium with a commemorative plaque to which football fans have bowed like pilgrims in Mecca for fifty years: “Italia – Alemania. 17 de junio de 1970. Partido del siglo.” The match of the century.
The dramaturgy of horror and horror begins in the seventh minute. 0:1, Boninsegna.
Roberto Boninsegna. No one suspects at that moment that this name will soon haunt us Germans in our sleep. That we would meet him again just one year later, on a sad European Cup night when Günter Netzer played the game of his life. With his Gladbach team, the “King of the Bökelberg” knocks the reigning World Cup winners Inter Milan off their feet 7:1. Only a failure of the floodlights could save the Italians that night, or the throwing of a Coke can. The warehouse worker Manfred K. then actually fires it, at the head of Boninsegna, who is making a throw-in. Others swear that the can only grazed his back. The can was empty in any case, but Boninsegna falls over as if struck by an axe. For seven minutes he lay motionless, the summoning of a priest for the last rites seemed unavoidable, and the dead mouse was finally carried out on a stretcher. The 7:1 score is subsequently annulled at the green table, Gladbach are kicked out, Netzer’s greatest game never took place, and from now on the worst swearword in German football is not actor or rogue, but Boninsegna.
But nobody knows that in the seventh minute on 17 June 1970. All they know is that it is now 1:0 for Italy, Boninsegna’s goal. After that, only Germany is on the attack. Shots, headers, corner kicks, ricochets. Facchetti fouls Beckenbauer. Seeler also falls in the penalty area. “The bastard is cheating us!” curses Müller at some point.
He means Arturo Yamasaki, the Mexican referee. He denies the Germans three penalties and thus provides the template for the smart TV commercial that Olli (“Dittsche”) Dittrich later shoots for a large electronics company. In it, he embodies an Italian Toni as the normal football-minded German imagines him, glittering gold chain, mafia sunglasses, a bucket of gel in his hair and always a cool saying on his lips – in this case Toni laughs at us Germans for always buying new TVs before a World Cup. “What do the Italians buy?” grins Toni. “They buy the referees.”
In any case, Yamasaki becomes the nail in the coffin of numerous German efforts. Although Beckenbauer has only one usable arm left after Facchetti’s foul (the other one has been taped to his body along with his shoulder), the Kaiser drags ball after ball to the front like a war invalid. “A-le-ma-nia!” the Mexicans shout. Overath hits the crossbar, once the ball dances on the goal line, but the bulwark of catenaccio holds.
Then the 90th minute is running and the Italians are counting on everything but Karl-Heinz Schnellinger. “Carlo” they call the man from Cologne, who has been playing for AC Milan for years, as a defender. He never crosses the halfway line there. But suddenly someone from the German bench calls out onto the field: “Carlo, forward!”
“Where to?” Schnellinger is supposed to have shouted back, because he doesn’t know his way around up front – but then he somehow finds his way through, sneaks in front of the Italian goal and instinctively does what he always does at the back: with an outstretched leg he lunges into Grabowski’s cross. 1:1: “Schnellinger, of all people!” shouts Ernst Huberty into his ARD microphone. It is three quarters of one in the night in Germany, and it is the goal for extra time. But above all, it’s the gateway to madness. What happens afterwards sweeps the whole world away. With his pulse pounding, Walter Lutz, editor-in-chief of the Zurich-based “Sport”, wrote how he was overcome by madness “in the most fascinating, stirring and exciting football match I have ever experienced, in the most thrilling and high-class game of this World Cup tournament, in a match in which all the dams burst in extra time, all the floodgates open generously and in which all the basic rules of football are thrown overboard”.
Gerd Müller’s 2:1 unleashes the avalanche of madness. With his thigh (or is it his butt cheek?), he wiggles the ball into the goal, and for the 102,000 eyewitnesses in the Azteca Stadium and the worldwide audience of billions, including me, it is suddenly clear: the Italians are finished, exhausted by the thin Mexican air and the sweltering heat, it is 50 degrees on the pitch. But instead Siggi Held makes the mistake of his life. 2:2 through Burgnich.
By now it’s no longer a game, but a wild mixture of heartbeat, heatstroke and Hitchcock. A “Bild” reporter has himself hooked up to a machine at home in the editorial office that certifies a heartbeat of 139. When Armstrong walked on the moon, he had 120.
2:3 by Gigi Riva.
I sink into my armchair. Every one of us knows moments like this, when he falls away from faith. And the misfortune is not made any more bearable by the staccato of cheers from the neighbouring balconies: “Ita-lia!”
Are the Italians going to finish us off now? No, decides Bomber Müller defiantly. Alongside Brazil’s Pele, he is the star of the World Cup, he has already scored nine goals, and in a rage he now scores his tenth. 3:3. Powerless, Gianni Rivera, the Milan star, stands on the goal line and bites into the net. Then Rivera trots to the kick-off with his head hanging. Italian attack on the left, ball into the penalty area.
3:4 by Rivera.
End. Over. As a decent German, I’m now finished with God and the world, and in the neighbourhood the “Ita-lia!” is getting more and more humiliating. From Wolfsburg we can still hear the VW guest workers celebrating the victory there with honking concerts and the battle cry: “Potato kaput. Spaghetti tastes good.” It’s half past one in the night – and the only nice thing is that 17 June 1970 is over.
by admin | Nov 9, 2022 | Oskar Beck EN, World Cup
“Come on, guys, get a ticket for the final,” said Gotthilf Fischer on July 6th 1974. The next day, the Fischer choirs sang us to World Cup victory, and the Fischer choir reporter had the perfect seat: the German goals fell directly in front of me – but Bernd Hölzenbein fell the best.
There are things you never throw away for the rest of your life. On the evening of the day they became important to you, you put them in the cigar box with the immortal mementos – and dig them out again in quiet moments.
Sometimes it takes thirty years. The dusty souvenir I want to tell you about here today has suffered. The ravages of time have gnawed at it, possibly even a ravenous moth, in any case it is crumpled and appears somewhat torn at the corners. “Munich, 3 p.m., Block E 2, standing room”, it says on the card. And the date.
7 July 1974.
My standing room in Block E 2 was, to put it bluntly, a good seat. It prevented me, for example, from seeing the full impact of the first scene of the 1974 World Cup final – after all, there were about a hundred and thirty metres between me and the spot where Uli Hoeneß left his leg out against Johan Cruyff. Of course, the news of the catastrophe somehow got through quickly to Block E 2: The referee blew his whistle for a penalty, Johan Neeskens scored, the loudspeaker announced the new score, and I let my trunk hang down to my feet in my standing position. But then, at the kick-off circle, which wasn’t all that far away, I saw Müller, who voluntarily wore the unlucky number 13 on his back due to his poorly developed superstition, and with his innate beer calm, the Bomber clapped his hands and shouted that I could almost hear it all the way up in Block E 2: “Let’s go, Uli – 89 minutes to go!”
That was Gerd Müller’s one good deed on that historically valuable day. The other, forty-two minutes later, was his 2:1. After that, we were world champions – and are now celebrating the 30th anniversary, albeit somewhat more subdued than the Miracle of Bern ’54.
That was a different story, from a different time. In 1974, the first millionaires in shorts were already standing on the pitch – no more haggard war returnees balming the sore soul of a flattened nation. Back then, Herberger’s heroes would have carried the goalposts onto the pitch, strewn the lines with sawdust and blown up the ball in order to be allowed to win – they were still other heroes, and their bonuses were still refrigerators, washing machines and gift baskets of food.
To cut a long story short: The Dutch were better on that 7 July 1974 in Munich, but they had no Hölzenbein. It was probably our hook-kicking Hesse who later inspired the poet Salman Rushdie to write the wonderful lines: “Swallows in the penalty area are like a sleight of hand, but good swallows are great art. A good swallow is like a salmon that leaps up, turns and falls back into the water. A good swallow is like the swan dying.”
Bernd Hölzenbein’s against the Dutch was so perfect that, although the rascal lay down right in front of my Block E 2, I wondered for a moment whether it was a swallow at all. Many years later, on the occasion of a DFB anniversary banquet, Schalke’s Olaf Thon was standing in the toilet next to Hölzenbein at the pissing trough and suddenly said, in the middle of the mutual trickle: “Bernd, I think you can give it.” But either way, the main thing was that Paule Breitner’s penalty afterwards was in.
The Dutch, hat’s off, were great. But we had our Seppl again, as in 1954, this time not as coach but in goal, before him Berti drove the great Cruyff to madness and self-sacrifice, and Katsche Schwarzenbeck, the Kaiser’s cleaner, was constantly thrown by Franz Beckenbauer as a rock in the surf of the Dutch attacking waves. But above all, we had our “bomber of the nation”, who was in truth the nation’s dustman – his goals always came out of nowhere.
On 7 July 1974, did even one of us 80,000 in the Olympic Stadium seriously see Müller on the ball before he struck just before half-time? As a surviving eyewitness from Block E 2, I can still describe the incident at first-hand today: Bonhof goes diagonally upright in front of my eyes, drives the ball flat and blindly inside, Müller stops it with his back to goal, hopelessly so, but suddenly he puts his Swabian butt out, turns around his own butt cheek, and the rest he had already sung about on record shortly before: “Then it goes boom…”
As if unleashed, Block E 2 collectively fell into each other’s arms at this moment, and exhausted by the cruel, nerve-racking, second-half onslaught of the Dutch on the goal right in front of us, we sank to our knees at the final whistle like our bomber Müller – unfortunately, he lit a fat cigar at the banquet in the Hilton in the evening, puffed away with Breitnerpaule and declared his resignation.
Apart from that, it was a fantastic day.
If only because of the Fischer choirs, who provided the musical framework for this great match in the Olympic Stadium and whom I still can’t praise enough thirty years later – for it was the case that Gotthilf Fischer had the best idea of his life the day before the match. One Remstalian washes another’s hand, so the great choirmaster said to the little local reporter B., who was still a special reporter for his district newspaper at the time, focusing on Fischer choirs, without further ado: “Come with me, guys, we’ll get you a ticket for the final.
And then also in the corner where the goal was scored by Breitnerpaule and Bomber Müller, and Hölzenbein over the outstretched leg of Wim Janssen. At the fiftieth anniversary at the latest, I’ll get out the dusty ticket again, and the grandchildren will be flabbergasted with awe: “You were there, grandpa?”
You bet I was. Gotthilf even waived the 15 marks.
by admin | Aug 26, 2021 | Legends, Oskar Beck EN
Diego Maradona could do things that a human being normally could not do. His disciples, therefore, considered him to be the extended arm and hand of the Almighty – and at some point, it is said, the day came when he believed them.
In the summer of 2018, the World Cup in Russia is overshadowed by a bizarre appearance in the stands in St. Petersburg. During Argentina’s match against Nigeria, Diego Maradona, visibly threatened by madness, is repeatedly broadcast in close-up to the whole world.
“Ar-gen-ti-na!” he roars.
“Li-o-nel!” he pleads.
But above all, he shouts crazy things across the stands that no one understands. The former king of football is completely out of control. He alternately asks a woman sitting next to him to dance with ecstatic twitches, leans dangerously over the railing to accept the homage of his fans, starts wild chants, gives the stadium and the world the extended middle finger and takes a nap in between. When Lionel Messi scores the eagerly awaited goal, the veins of his predecessor on the people’s hero throne swell, at the peak of the jubilation (“Messi! Messi!”) his eyes completely pop out of his head, and when he leaves the stands after the final whistle, he has to be supported.
Maradona was taken to hospital and the football world expected the worst that night. But the next day, the born-again gave the all-clear on Instagram, writing defiantly: “Diego will be around for a while.” Now the sad news reached us yesterday: the while is over.
Diego Maradona is dead.
This time it is true. It has to be said explicitly because many will not believe it at first, too many times Maradona has been declared dead. We remember well a fellow Argentine reporter who said at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa: “A cat has seven lives, but with Maradona, we stopped counting.” It was the same after the bizarre standoff in St Petersburg: as a result of a cardiac arrest, a red-hot busybody spread on the internet, the football king had died in hospital. Credibly and indignantly, Maradona contradicted this a few days later in his TV show:
Do I look like I’m dead?
At least he didn’t look well.
Diego Armando Maradona. You can’t do justice to this terrific, crazy and unique figure of football with one obituary, you need two: one for the supernatural football god – and the other for the poor guy off the pitch who couldn’t always manage without the ball on his foot and got lost in the labyrinth of life.
Yet this life had started well. Those who are born in Fiorito, this unfortunate district of Buenos Aires, don’t really have a chance, but the little fuzzy-headed boy made the most of it. At the age of 16, “El Pibe de Oro”, the golden boy, was already old enough for his first international match, and his Argentine national coach Cesar Luis Menotti said: “What Diego can do with his feet, we mortals can’t even do with our hands.” Not much later, the prodigy thrilled at FC Barcelona and SSC Napoli, as the world’s best footballer.
Above all, he was the king of the Neapolitans, and unforgettable for all those who were there is his one-man show before the 1989 UEFA Cup final against VfB Stuttgart. 70,000 Swabians were sitting in the Neckar Stadium when the magician scooped the ball onto his foot during the warm-up at the kick-off circle and began to juggle. The ball bounced onto his other foot, then onto his knee, chest, head, rested briefly on his neck, and back it went, head, chest, knee, foot. This went on for minutes, not once did the magician allow the ball to make contact with the ground, and at some point 70,000 Swabians were no longer sitting, but standing and celebrating (“Diego! Diego!”) this circus acrobat who gave them the greatest experience of their spectators’ lives. I was shooting a film that evening for the programme “Sport under the microscope” and stood in amazement on the sidelines, and when Maradona, so as not to jeopardise the punctual kick-off, finally dropped the ball, my cameraman said: “Now we can go. That’s the best we’re going to get today.”
The only time Maradona was even better was at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico when he elevated his country to the throne. In the quarter-finals, he danced past six English players from the halfway line and completed the goal of the century. He went on to become FIFA Footballer of the Century, along with Pele. A jury of experts chose the Brazilian, an internet jury the Argentinian. The nonsensical scholarly war over who was the better of the two was later settled by Brazilian World Cup coach Carlos Alberto Parreira with the question: “Who was better – Monet or van Gogh?”
You know what, write what you want.
But soon it was on to the darker news. One day, Hector Pezzella, the director of the “Güemes” clinic in Buenos Aires, treated his compatriot who had been admitted with unclear symptoms and was quoted with the confusing diagnosis: “I think Maradona thinks he’s a god.”
Were these the late effects of that legendary World Cup match against England in 1986? For Maradona had scored a second legendary goal that day, unfairly, irregularly, with his bare fist. “That was the hand of God,” he claimed after the final whistle. Did Maradona think he was an extension of the Almighty? Or God himself?
That’s as good as we get today.
His disciples, his worshippers, encouraged him in this belief. They founded their own church for their saint, the “Iglesia Maradoniana”, whereby they did not write “Dios”, the Spanish word for God, but “D+10+S” – the “10” stood for Maradona’s biblical back number. His professing fans regularly met on his birthdays, worshipped him devoutly and sold T-shirts as his apostles that read: “I have seen God.” In the long run, only the strongest last. At some point, Maradona could no longer keep it together – and his fake friends, who supplied him with drugs, took care of the rest.
In his mid-30s, he began to talk about dying for the first time. At the 1994 World Championships, he, the crowned king, had been caught doping. He announced that he was not killing himself only because of his daughters, and once he said on television: “Many always wanted to see me dead – I am dead.” The world then understood how serious it was, at the very latest, from the following pictures: A small, fat star bounces into the TV studio for a talk show, dances the tango with a beauty queen named Cecilia – and collapses. Afterwards, he is seen again in a wheelchair in hospital, and the medical world whispers about “irreparable defects”, points to the destruction of brain cells due to excessive cocaine consumption and sees the star psychologically disintegrating.
Depression, aggression, paranoia, suicidal tendencies. Maradona was then sent to Switzerland, to a clinic on Lake Biel, to fight his drug addiction, and at the height of the therapy the professor demanded of him: “I want you to play big again at the 1998 World Cup.” Maradona nodded. Shortly afterwards, however, he shoved behind in the face of a stadium steward in England with his trousers down, and in Alicante, Spain, he smashed two doors, a table and five chairs in a hotel. A heart attack followed, by which time he was 43. And before he was 50, he was poking around in the fog of his life with the pole in such a way that a psychiatrically knowledgeable observer reported: “In a hospital, one thought he was Einstein and another Newton, and when Maradona said he was Maradona, they laughed.”
By any means necessary, Maradona at times tried to destroy himself in the deadly cycle between genius and madness. His liver was affected, and compounding the problem was his corpulence, which swelled to 140 kilos. He made the headlines as the “Maratonna”, and in the greatest emergency, his stomach was cut in half. He then went into temporary exile in Cuba, had Fidel Castro give him a revolutionary cap, and in the end, the shortest of all headlines was: “He’s crazy.”
But he lived. “The bearded one,” Maradona said, “always saves me.” He didn’t mean the bearded man in Cuba, but the one in the sky who once again lent him his hand: Maradona did indeed rise from the dead – and became national coach.
Especially those journalists at whom Maradona had occasionally shot with an air rifle were sceptical at first. In the past, they scoffed, Diego had been magical with the ball at his foot, but as a coach, he had a board in front of his head. He then paid them back brilliantly, or rather: genitally. After the successful qualification for the 2010 World Cup, he offered the reporters in the press conference: “And now you can all give me a blowj…” – and shot them down.
Then, at the World Cup in South Africa, everything went quite well at first. And when Maradona performed, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house; I witnessed it in the “Soccer City” stadium in Johannesburg. His Gauchos had just beaten the Mexicans 3:1, when an Argentine colleague in the press conference was already thinking ahead – and asked Maradona about the next opponent in the quarter-finals, the Germans. “No, no, no,” he grumbled sullenly, “today we talk about our victory and tomorrow about Germany.”
The reporters continued to press.
Didn’t you listen, I’m not saying anything about Germany!
Just one word, Diego, one of them begged …
“You know what,” Maradona then went ballistic, “write whatever you want.” And then he passed his thick, steaming Havana again, which one of his henchmen had kept warm for him while the master spoke.
Maradona was on fire. He was El Diego the Great once more. Every day he was the talk of the town – with diamonds in his ears and a rosary wrapped around his fingers, he magnetically attracted every camera, every step, every blink of an eye was broadcast live – and Maradona promised that if he won the World Cup he would run naked through Buenos Aires. Then it went splat. 0:4 against Germany. Out.
Diego Maradona, the once idolised player, was henceforth increasingly pitied and ridiculed. He did strange things, continued to befriend questionable leaders (as he had done with Ghadafi in Libya), took to the stage in the election campaign in Venezuela for Chavez and later for Maduro (“I am his soldier”), and bitter words now frequently made the rounds about him, from “full of crap” to “crazy”. The World Cup appearance in St. Petersburg matched this. Shortly afterwards, he had himself driven around a stadium in Belarus and announced: “I am now president of the Dinamo Brest club.” What he did there for a short time has never been known exactly, but it is said to have been the best contract of his life after all. In the end, a sheikh in Dubai, a Mexican second-division club and a club in Buenos Aires also paid good money to be allowed to adorn themselves with the old world star who could do everything as long as he had a ball at his foot.
The final word should belong to Ryan Giggs. The Welshman, who used to dribble elegantly at Manchester United, was only a small light compared to the Argentine – but he knew what he was talking about when he said: “Today there is Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo. But I’ve seen things from Diego Maradona that I’ve never seen from anyone else in the history of football.”
