thus he revolutionized football

Franz Beckenbauer he passed away in the year of his 78th birthday: he was born in Munich on 11 September 1945, when the Second World War had just ended in Europe (it happened in May) and the rubble was still smoking everywhere there Germania. He was born, therefore, as a free man. This adjective would have belonged to him like a second skin, the third and fourth were the shirt of the German national football team, which he wore for the first of 103 times (14 goals) at the age of twenty in September ’65, and that of Bayern, with whom he joined when he was just 13 years old: this took him 575 times between the Bundesliga and various cups (he won both: 5 championships and 4 German cups, three Champions Cups when they were only the champions to participate in it, a Cup Winners’ Cup that no longer exists and an intercontinental one): he also won three US championships when the greats at the end of their careers went there as if it were Arabia that was sowing football, but the sowing didn’t yield much except for the their bank accounts.

INSIGHTS

When he returned to Germany, in his second new “home” season, he won another title, and this time with the Hamburg shirt. Libero, it was said: that was the role on the pitch of this 1.81m tall Bavarian boy (not just half a century ago), son of a postal secretary and nephew of a footballer uncle. How he interpreted it, no one had ever done it. He wrote the script for her Helmut Schonwho had grown up as a footballer in Nazi Germany, then found himself in Eastern Germany and finally landed in Western Germany, where he coached them to the silver medal of the ’66 World Cup, to the legend of Italy-Germany 4-3, to the home world gold in ’74.

The role of the “free” born with him

And there was always Beckenbauer, Kaiser Franz as they called him, because he was the emperor of Germany, the one who was there before the tragedy.

He played as a “Beckenbauer-style libero”, because this was the expression of his interpretation on the grass (Gaetano Scirea and Franco Baresi would also have done it), who was placed there in front of the defense (but not in the vineyard as a post, indeed, moving with the elegance of a player who has style and quality and is not the grim and uncouth one destined to catch whatever moves, whether it was the ball or the calf it made no difference, said the catenacciari. But yes: the Kaiser he was, as many defined him, the conductor to the tune of Schoen, and the construction began a little more from the top than the bottom today: from the podium, almost, rather than from the prompter’s hole which is the goalkeeper’s door.

Beckenbauer in the national team is especially remembered in those World Cups: that of ’66, when the Queen of England was Pelè, as Antonello Venditti sang. In the final that the English won with the goal that wasn’t there and with more than 11 players playing (the referee trio) Beckenbauer, who had scored 4 goals in the tournament, things from Eusebio, had the task of checking up to the cabinet Bobby Charlton, who had the opposite delivery; the two canceled each other out; in that Italy-Germany of ’70 he played the last 25 minutes, the half hour that put all Italy to sleep and that still makes us dream, with his right arm held up by a bandage, that there were no more substitutions and he had fallen badly dislocating his shoulder; in the ’74 World Cup he won the match that he should never have won, that of Johan’s Holland Crujiff who hid the ball from you and scored immediately but then, to quote the English champion Lineker, “football is that simple game, 11 against 11, 90 minutes long and in the end the Germans win”.

That record shared with Zagallo and Deschamps

World champion on the pitch, Kaiser Franz also became a world champion on the bench and was the first to achieve this extraordinary double (the Brazilian Zagallo and the Frenchman Deschamps were the others to do so) when, at the Olimpico in Rome, Italy 1990, his Germany which was now only Germany because the wall had fallen a few months earlier, defeated Maradona’s Argentina

Private life and illness

He was so tidy on the grass podium but left it to the Bavarian Mediterranean style private life and the managerial one: three wives, a bit of fiscal trouble, a vague reticence (which earned him the vice-presidency of FIFA) in telling how the awarding of the 2006 World Cup to Germany went (not just Russians, Emiratis and Arabs…). Then he got sick. Ocular infarction, Parkinson’s, cardiac disasters. And today, via social media, the family communication of his passing, shortly after Sir Bobby Charlton, the opponent at Wembley, the one to follow wherever he went.

© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

1970-01-01 00:00:00
#revolutionized #football