Forever Gerd

To continue celebrating the life of footballing icon Gerd Müller, who passed away on Sunday after a long illness, here's another of the short pieces I've written about him over the years. This one appeared on the When Saturday Comes website in the first week of September 2013.

It seems almost insultingly trite to mention the great man died on the first Bundesliga weekend of 2021-22 or that Robert Lewandowski finally took his record for a single Bundesliga season, by a single goal, scored in the final minute of the final match in Bayern's final completed league campaign of Der Bomber's life.

But I hope this piece demonstrates such symbolism, perhaps inevitable when a player sets standards as historic as Müller’s, helps guarantee - and celebrate - the legacy of a lovely man with a seminal talent.

  

First Lionel Messi beat his record for goals in a calendar year. Now Gerd Müller’s German international scoring record will be equalled if Miroslav Klose nets in Friday’s World Cup Group C qualifier. The game takes place in Munich, where Müller became a Bayern legend. The opponents are Austria – against who Müller scored a pivotal winner, also in Bavaria, en route to Mexico 1970. Such symbolism is crucial as Müller, a humble man familiar with hardship, is finally feted in a manner commensurate with his achievements.

While chasing down those 85 goals in a year, Messi failed to score against Celta Vigo last November, on Müller’s 67th birthday. Now his most famous record – 68 goals for Germany - is about to go in his 68^th year.  Klose’s first international goal, like Müller’s, came at home to Albania. Both managed 14 goals in World Cup finals tournaments, both have won the World Cup Golden Boot.  Yet Klose is 35 years old, his next international appearance will be his 129th - Müller retired after his 62nd cap, aged 28.

Müller’s  tallies are being caught but it’s questionable whether his stats are being truly equalled, and it’s almost certain his prowess isn’t being matched.  Messi hasn’t won any World Cups or Copa Americas and has a “mere” 35 goals in 82 internationals. Müller has World Cup gold and bronze medals and a European Championship. It took Pippo Inzaghi approximately 40 more games than Müller to equal his 67 goals in all European club competition.

Müller is still regarded as the poacher par excellence, renowned for his phenomenal reactions, killer instinct and unstinting bravery in the box. Yet in his history of German football, Tor! , Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger explains "Der Bomber", probably coined by a British journalist, is the most famous but least appropriate of Müller’s  nicknames.

Post-war xenophobia and footballing jealousy saw him often regarded abroad as clinical in the pejorative sense – coldly merciless. He certainly hated waste, being born into an unfriendly world, just months after Germany lost the Second World War and then quickly losing his father.

But despite 365 goals in the Bundesliga he claims he was always as clueless as the poor goalkeepers about where he’d put the ball. When he ran down his career in the USA he struggled with English, business deals then alcohol - he split from his wife. Müller is one of life’s innocents, a man who lived off his key skill.

His two strikes in the 1974 European Cup final replay against Atletico Madrid  - a long-range lob and a trigonometry-defying volley -  proved he could do  the spectacular. His versatility was proven in the following year’s final against Leeds, when he switched to midfield after Terry Yorath put Bjorn Andersson out the match early on (Müller still scored the winner though).

But the 21st century’s expanded competitions and extended careers have inadvertently instigated a sustained celebration of the game’s greatest ever striker. When Brazil’s Ronaldo scored against Japan in the 2006 World Cup to equal Müller’s finals record, and then against Ghana a few days later to beat it, both games took place at Borussia Dortmund’s Westfalen stadium, yards from where Müller opened his account against Albania in 1967. The symbolism sharpened the comparisons. Ronaldo’s total required an extra tournament and six more finals games.

The more his records are threatened and overhauled, the more valid they become. Arriving at Bayern in 2003, Dutch goal machine Roy Makaay seemed a possible challenger to Müller’s 1971-72 feat of 40 goals in a Bundesliga campaign. The most he managed in any season was 23. 

When Müller set that record his strike partner Uli Hoeness chipped in another 13 goals. This allowed Wolfsburg’s front pairing of Edin Dezeko (26 goals) and Grafite (28) to claim they were the biggest scoring partnership in Bundesliga history at the end of the 2008-09 campaign. Mostly, Müller’s stats are “toppled” tenuously. But he’ll be first to congratulate the topplers.

Update, August 2021: Klose indeed scored Germany's opener in what turned out to be a 3-0 win over Austria that night. He failed to score in his next two appearances for Germany but finally surpassed Müller's total with international goal no. 69 making it 4-1 in a 6-1 friendly win over Armenia, in Mainz, in June 2014.

And Brazilian Ronaldo took Müller's World Cup finals record against Ghana, in Germany? Well, eight years later Klose equalled Ronaldo's record against Ghana in Brazil, and took the overall record back to Deutschland when scoring the second - his sixteenth in World Cup finals and the 71st and final goal of his international career - in Germany's historic 7-1 win over Brazil themselves, on their home patch, in the semi-final.

That'll teach them to mess with a Müller record.

Forever Gerd. Gerd forever.

Auf Wiedersehen, Gerd.

Olympic Stadium, Munich. 7 July 1974. ITV’s Hugh Johns:

“Oh, that's the way that little man gets them! That’s the way he gets it"

Hundreds of them he got.  Literally hundreds.

And he got them every way. Every way imaginable.

Stealing it off Schwarzenbeck's toes for his second in the Euro 72 final.

Slashing it into the top corner from a ridiculous angle plus the most outlandish lob you've ever seen, the night Bayern first became Champions of Europe.

The control, turn and daisy-cutter into the bottom corner at Wembley in the Euros quarter-final (That celebration! A rhapsody of joy in long-sleeved green).

The ghosting run to the front post versus Leeds in Paris, 1975.

The poach, pen and header versus Bulgaria at Mexico 1970 then the perfect hat-trick - right, left, header - versus Peru... in the next game. The next bloody game. Straight hat-tricks in a World Cup finals.

What does he do for his first in extra-time versus Italy in the semi? Does anyone know? I still don’t and it’s still my favourite.

It's Being There, timing, harassment, fortitude, technique, spatial awareness - penalty box scoring boiled down to its very essence. That it looks like a clumsy car crash when it's actually the most genius, minimalist touch ever imparted on a football; that he has found the way to unravel the defence which outlawed scoring the previous decade: that the touch of the toe of his boot – a boot made by the company owned by the man who put the studs in the soles of his hero Max Morlock to help him score to help win the 1954 World Cup final in rain-soaked Europe - locates, in sun-drenched Central America, the millimetre click of not the housing, not the chamber, not the cylinder but the very pin required to open the lock that cracks Catenaccio, makes it the apogee of poaching.

The man wearing Morlock's 13 in the Azteca Stadium, one month before my first birthday, is the Master Key.

Half the global army of Gerdy zealots didn't see him play yet we ranted and ranted until he eventually began appearing in more “All-Time World” XIs (Exactly How many international tournaments did Cruyff, Eusebio and Di Stefano win??).

The spectacular slide-and-slash onto Uli Hoeness' electric run versus Yugoslavia in the Rheinstadion.

The miscontrol that isn't a miscontrol on 7th July 1974...

... The twist that is actually a contortion Cronenberg would deem too grizzly for the big screen ...

... the entire Dutch defence, and most of the watching globe, sent the wrong way as Gerdy wins the World Cup with the 68th goal of his 62nd international...

... his last international because the DFB wouldn't let the players' wives into the post-match party.

He stopped at 28. Which, like the fact there were so few internationals played in his day, is just as well for Ronaldo, was acknowledged by Miro Klose when he took his Germany total and was respectfully complimented by Messi, sending him a framed, signed jersey when he took Gerd's record for goals in a calendar year.

It was like Jimmy the Gent paying Paulie his tribute after the Lufthansa Heist. When you beat a Mueller record you know you're a legend. Or you check your stats.

He split with his wife because he moved her and their daughter to the States and couldn't settle in, wasn’t comfortable speaking English, and took to drink - all while scoring in the NASL. Always a scorer – always a painfully humble man.

Grew up, without a father, playing on bomb sites. Grew out on his mother's potato salad.

Had to borrow boots for his first trial. Had to listen to his first Bayern coach call him a bear among racehorses - and the Little Fat Miller.

And I bet that when he won three straight European Cups, the Cup-Winners Cup, a World Cup, the Euros and the Ballon d'Or, Gerdy still wished he was as good as Max Morlock.

I met him but I'd never seen him play. He was retired long before I heard about him. But I read about him. I learned that poaching, the only thing I'd ever been good at on a football pitch, the thing that got me a fair few slaggings as a kid, from peers, wasn't just permissable - it was necessary.

 It wasn't just about the stats, his totals exciting some geek to memorise some data. It was his example, his life-story, inspiring some Ayrshire gonk to actually go out and find a way to make my one limited skill worthy of a place in a football team despite my total lack of athleticism or ball control.

He won everything - and it probably wasn't enough. I twice finished top scorer for a team that finished bottom of its Sunday League - and it means the world to me. And it’s thanks to him.

The man who took the most explosive move of the Euro 72 final  - Beckenbauer surging forward, Netzer off the bar, Heynckes' vicious swerving volley parried by the Soviets - and turned it into one of the most spectacular goals of all time, by putting the thing in the bloody net.

Ronaldo demands unconditional worship and Messi wants our condolences because he's living a life of luxury in Paris. The greatest Gerd Mueller legacy isn't that he won more World Cups than those two combined but that he inspired by eschewing the limelight. He genuinely just wanted to score lots of goals, have a beer with his mates, some potato salad with his mum and a dance with his wife.

Rest easy, Gerdy. Rest easy, my hero. And, for the first time since November 1945, the defenders and goalkeepers of the world can rest easy too.