Lost European Cup final: Jürgen Kohler (l.) fell Rotterdam’s Tomasson in his last game and had to leave the field with a red card.
Photo: image/Bob van den Cruijsem
Matthias Sammer withdrew from operational football business eight years ago, but that hasn’t really been noticed until now. Week after week, cameras capture him on the sidelines between London, Madrid and Munich. The television expert Sammer has probably visited so many stadiums since officially ending his career that it is enough for him to be in the top spot among the leading groundhoppers in the European football circus. Last Tuesday he was in Munich at the Bavarian 3-0 gala against Lazio, a week earlier at Borussia Dortmund’s not-so-demanding 1-1 draw in Eindhoven. And of course he will also be there this Wednesday when BVB wants to do a little better in the second leg against PSV – so that they can reach the quarter-finals of the Champions League.
Circus Europe
Photo: Private
Previously simply the national champions’ cup, today the Champions League: a staged spectacle and football’s money-printing machine. Sven Goldmann looks ahead to the upcoming match day.
There’s more at play for Sammer in Dortmund: he’s under contract there as a consultant, and there’s also a bit of love involved. He won the Champions League and the German championship with BVB as a player, later he was also a champion as a coach and was on the verge of winning a European Cup. That was 22 years ago – then as now it was against a Dutch team. In 2002 the UEFA Cup final was against Feyenoord Rotterdam. Dortmund felt stronger than ever: In the semifinals, they shot AC Milan back over the Alps with a 4-0 win and won the Bundesliga title three days before the showdown. It was easy to cope with the fact that the UEFA Cup final was taking place in Rotterdam.
The game was Dortmund’s farewell gift for Jürgen Kohler, the 1990 world champion who was born with an iron foot. He had won the 1997 Champions League final with BVB against Juventus Turin and earned the reputation as a football god. The game in Rotterdam was the last for the 37-year-old in his 18-year career. After half an hour, Lars Ricken, the hero of the premier class triumph in 1997, played a sloppy back pass to Kohler, who was no longer able to make a tackle with his iron foot and instead knocked over Feyenoord’s Dane Jon Dahl Tomasson. Because this stupidly happened in the penalty area, the referee punished BVB twice: red card for Kohler, penalty for Rotterdam, which Pierre van Hooijdonk converted.
As a result, the decimated Dortmund team were better, but the B grade for artistic value was not decisive in 2002. Van Hooijdonk scored a second goal, Tomasson a third – so that Dortmund’s goals from Marcio Amoroso and Jan Koller no longer had any decisive influence on the game.
At the nightly banquet after the final 2:3, Kohler gave an emotional speech. Matthias Sammer, on the other hand, stated in his sober manner that “we scored all five goals ourselves today.” Let’s see what he says this Wednesday when Borussia faces a top Dutch team in a knockout game again.
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