Gareth: Euro penalty miss lives with me
Police allotment hunt ‘an act of desperation’
GUTTED Southgate in 1996
ENGLAND manager Gareth Southgate has relived his Euro ’96 penalty miss talking to Prince William.
Gareth told how the feeling he “failed under pressure” stayed with him throughout his career.
Southgate said: “I never felt anger, actually I just felt regret, remorse, responsibility. To a small degree that still lives with me.”
“It’s tough because even now I still have regrets for the team I played with.”
Tournament hosts England, who were widely tipped to win the trophy, lost on penalties in the semi-final against eventual winners Germany.
The Prince was talking to Southgate in the run up to today’s FA Cup final, which is linked with William’s Heads Together mental health campaign.
Officers
A POLICE search of the garden allotment where Brueckner lived was an act of “pure” desperation, his lawyer claims.
Officers spent two days digging up the foundations of the rented shack, removing rubble from the remains.
Diggers, sniffer dogs, groundpenetrating radar and drones were used to examine the site near Hanover where he stayed after Madeleine vanished.
When they left on Wednesday evening, they refused to say what had been discovered.
But it is believed they lifted a stone slab to find a cellar full of corrugated iron, which a sniffer dog reacted to. Brueckner’s lawyer Friedrich Fuelscher called the search a “pure desperate act of the public prosecutor’s office”.
This week locals urged police to search a second site an hour away but Mr Fuelscher said: “They won’t find anything there.”
In the footage “cheerful” Brueckner poses doing the peace sign and can be seen laughing and joking as he studies a map in the back of the van.
The convicted sex offender had given three young German travellers who were on a “trip of a lifetime” a lift in Spain in his tatty white and yellow T3 Westfalia.
The video was shot on March 30, 2007 – five weeks before Madeleine vanished in Praia da Luz , Portugal.
One of the travellers, known only as Tomas, 35, said: “It makes me sick to think that the little girl could have been taken away in the same van a month later.
“He seemed like any other ordinary young man. He was cheerful and joked a lot and happy to give us a ride in his VW.”
“He would repeatedly give us the peace sign by making a ‘V’ with his fingers.
“It is almost that he tried too hard to be our friend. He must have known we could never suspect what a terrible man he really was. It is scary to know now he was
CHEERFUL Brueckner poses with travellers a rapist of an elderly woman and targeted children. We could not have known he was such a monster.”
The three pals had been taking part in a challenge to transport a caravan from Faro in the Algarve to Saxony in Germany while surviving on 10 Euros a day, getting truck drivers to tow it. A pal of Brueckner suggested he could help.
Brueckner drove 300 miles, almost five hours, from Praia da Luz to Malaga, Spain, to pick them up, then drove them for another three hours to Vera, Almeria.
“He was a stranger and decided to drive us,” Tomas said. “He told us to call him the ‘Happy Hobby Hippy’ because he liked to hang out with people who were hippies.
“When we got there we all hugged him and thanked him and he said he was going on back to Portugal.”
A few days later he messaged them to say: “Guys, enjoy your remaining days with all your heart, because reality will catch up with you very quickly.”
In June last year Interpol quizzed the woman in the group about the trip.
Former mechanic Brueckner, 43, is in a German jail for drug offences.
He is still awaiting sentence for the rape of a 72-year-old woman in Portugal.