UNLIKELY HERO
As a new film comes out charting the amazing life of Manchester City’s German goalkeeper Bert Trautmann, Bob Wilson pays tribute to his...
injury but still paralysed by grief, Trautmann became the first foreigner, and the first keeper, to be voted Footballer of the Year by the Football Writers’ Association.
He died, aged 89, in 2013, his career defined by his performance in the 1956 final. but there was much more to it than that. He was City’s keeper for 15 years, and for most of that time, easily their most popular player. Throughout the Fifties, Manchester’s parks and playgrounds resounded with the cry ‘i’ll be bert’. Years later, when a play was staged about him, that was its title.
He’d joined City from st Helens Town in 1949, having arrived in lancashire four years earlier as a prisoner of war. At first, he was the object of intense anti- German hostility even from City’s own fans. Manchester’s large Jewish community was outraged. Protests and boycotts were organised. but then one of the city’s leading rabbis called for Trautmann not to be made a scapegoat for the misdeeds of his countrymen.
His bravery and brilliance in goal stopped the axe-grinding, too. soon he was lionised, not least by a budding goalkeeper growing up not far away in Chesterfield.
‘i used to stand behind the goal at Chesterfield home games and our young goalie was a lad called Gordon banks,’ Wilson recalls. ‘Even at that age he had tremendous spring. but banksy wasn’t that much older than me and a different kind of goalkeeper.
‘bert was my hero and it didn’t hurt that he was amazingly goodlooking. Many years later, when i was a sports presenter for the bbC, i got to know him well. They say never meet your heroes, but truly, bert was the greatest man i’d ever met.’
in 2005, to go with Trautmann’s
Iron Cross and FA Cup winner’s medal, a unique set of gongs was completed with an honorary OBE, for his contribution to AngloGerman relations. When the Queen pinned it on him, she is said to have remarked: ‘Ah, Herr Trautmann, I remember you. Have you still got that pain in the neck?’
But that’s not how Bob Wilson remembers him. ‘For me, it was all his years of excellence that define him, not that injury. Arguably, I did the head-first diving better than him because I never broke my neck. Mind you, I did have my left ear virtually torn off at Ipswich, as well as a punctured lung, nine broken ribs and a broken arm.
‘In a way, I owed that to Bert. On the other hand, my most famous save was at the feet of George Best in our Double-winning season. I owed that to Bert too.
The Keeper premieres tomorrow and is on general release on April 5.
‘In a one-against-one situation, Bert always dived head first at a time when every other goalkeeper went feet first’