Muller was ultimate poacher who never looked like missing
H‘der Bomber’, who has died aged 75, ended England’s reign as world champions and fired West Germany to glory in 1974
For English football fans of a certain age, Gerd Muller was the man who shattered hopes and dreams. Those who were around at the time have an image etched on their memory of the German forward, who died yesterday at the age of 75, dispatching England from the World Cup in Mexico. His volleyed goal, executed from all of two yards out while apparently hovering above the ground, was the strike that ended England’s reign as world champions, confirming their exit from the competition in the quarter-finals.
And the thing is, in his time it was not only English ambitions Muller thwarted. For the Dutch he was the player who upended their expectations when he scored the winner against their national side in the 1974 World Cup final.
In the club game, for fans of other teams, he was the striker who invariably delivered the decisive blow to secure Bayern Munich’s victory across countless European ties.
Such was his brilliance in the box, he was capable of undermining any and every opponent. He was the man who made a generation weep.
But for the Bayern faithful and followers of the German national team, he was a beloved hero. He was “Der Bomber”, the forward who laid waste to opposition defences, the man who made the difference.
His statistics for West Germany are quite ridiculous. He scored 68 goals in 62 appearances for the national side, making him the only player in the past 60 years to score more than 50 international goals at a rate of more than a one a game.
Domestically he was no less effective; he scored more than 30 goals for Bayern across 10 successive seasons, accumulating a total of 365 in 427 Bundesliga appearances. In Europe too, he flattened everything before him. He was the top scorer in the European Cup for four seasons, netting 66 times in 74 European games. No wonder the Bayern president Herbert Hainer said of his death: “Today is a sad, dark day for FC Bayern and all its fans. Gerd Muller was the greatest striker there’s ever been.”
With a record like that, it is hard to argue. This was the ultimate poacher. Like Diego Maradona, Muller appeared to be physically square-shaped. His legs were short and wide (his calves made Jack Grealish look emaciated), his backside wider than the Rhine, his centre of gravity so low it was almost subterranean. He could accelerate as if apparently rocket-fuelled, covering a couple of yards before defenders had time to think. The power in his legs too gave him a gymnast’s leap, enabling him to outjump centre-backs who invariably towered over him. Couple his physical assets with a brain seemingly capable of deconstructing the geometry of a pitch at will, and he was always in the right place at the right time, there precisely to finish other’s work.
Gary Lineker described him as “the greatest penalty-box striker I have ever seen”. It takes one to know one.
Muller joined Bayern in 1964, when the club were languishing in the second tier. Thirty-three league goals in his first season helped restore them to the Bundesliga, and within four years Bayern were German champions; propelled by his goals it was a title they won four times in five years. Their ascendancy went beyond the confines of the German league; they won three European Cups in a row, from 1974-76, runs to which Muller contributed 18 goals, including three in two finals.
In his 15 years at Bayern, Muller was the Bundesliga’s top scorer seven times, the German footballer of the year twice and he lifted the Ballon d’or in 1970. He left in 1979 to follow the likes of Pele and George Best to the nascent North American Soccer League, where he played three seasons for Fort Lauderdale Strikers. Forty-two years on from his retirement he remains the Bundesliga’s all-time top scorer. Initially, after he first gave up playing, he struggled with life away from the penalty box. He was enslaved by alcoholism and seemed on a self-destructive downward spiral until, recognising his troubles, his friends and colleagues at Bayern paid for him to go into rehab, before he was offered a job as the secondteam coach at the club.
His presence in Bavaria was always a source of pride to his successors: this was a legend working at the club. Sadly, in 2015 he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and he passed his last few years quietly.
To watch the goal he scored to knock England out of the Mexico World Cup is to see a master at work. From the moment the ball is delivered into the box there was only ever going to be one outcome. The way he finds himself in the perfect position to exploit the England keeper Peter Bonetti’s hesitancy, the way he adjusts his body and volleys the ball while seemingly floating on air, it is the perfect summation of the striker’s art. That was Gerd Muller: you knew he was never going to miss.