Gerd Muller Dies Aged 75

[Rousseau 9,351]

 

[compo 6,105]

Just been reading that Gerd Muller has passed away,  a terrific goalscorer. 

[alexscottislegend 2,057]

27 minutes ago, compo said:

Just been reading that Gerd Muller has passed away,  a terrific goalscorer. 

The best ever. "Nobody ever only scores goals." 

[ChelseaBoy 2,232]

When we were kids playing on the fields there was always an argument over who would be Muller, who Bonoff and who Fischer - quality and iconic players for different reasons. 

[ChelseaBoy 2,232]

He apparently scored 68 goals in 62 appearances for West Germany and 547 goals in 594 games for Bayern. Wow!! 

 

Impressive as Bayern were not the all conquring force they are now as Monchangladbach, Hamburg, Koln and others were also league winners. 

[26th of foot 5,827]

I was fortunate to witness Gerd Muller play live on several occasions. 

 

A truly wonderful player and as Compo says, "a terrific goalscorer". The period from late 60s to early 70s saw Rangers meet Bayern half-a dozen times. The ECWC meetings are well remembered but, my lasting memory was the UEFA Cup first round meeting in September'70. The first leg had finished 1-0 in Munich, Beckenbauer netting midway through the first half. The feeling was revenge for the '67 final defeat was in our grasp. A crowd of 85,000 squeezed into Ibrox on a humid evening as Bayern ran out in their traditional red and white stripes.

 

Feelings grew as Rangers pressed throughout, several chances created, all squandered. Ten minutes remained when a clearance from the Bayern box saw Ronnie McKinnon tussle with Muller. As they reached the eighteen yard D, Ronnie's pace told and he ran across Muller taking the ball. The Swiss Ref' blew up and signalled an indirect free kick for obstruction. Gerd placed the ball on the penalty box line, stepped back and struck a swerving shot. It rounded the wall and found the net via the inside of the post. No problem, an indirect free kick had found the net without being touched? The Ref' awarded the goal.

 

As the controversy raged, Gerd stood with both arms outstretched. Rangers equalised straight from the restart, Colin Stein finding the net. The tie was over, we lost 2-1 on aggregate. Muller left the pitch, both arms outstretched and aloft. Behind him, the Rangers players crowded the Ref' in the centre circle.  

 

I witnessed Muller netting twice in two matches for West Germany against Scotland at Hampden. His equaliser in late '73 was special. Again, on the edge of the box he took a pass into feet, dropped a shoulder that saw Jim Holton fall in a heap and, swept the ball into the high far corner of the net. He walked away arms outstretched and aloft.

 

The three best I have seen at Ibrox includes Muller. The other two being Cruyff(Ajax) and Kempes(Valencia).

[onevision 1,441]

Was at the 1970 match....the song that sticks with me that was being sung that night was '' the hills are alive with the sound of MULLERS A bastard''

What a player and prolific goalscorer....

 

Remember the goal the goal he scored in extra time against England in the 70 world cup quarter and the 74 final.

Edited August 15, 2021 by onevision

[Uilleam 5,409]

OBITUARY

Gerd Müller obituary

Deadly centre forward for West Germany who proved to be England’s nemesis during the 1970 World Cup quarter final in Mexico

Monday August 16 2021, 12.01am, The Times

 

 

Gerd Müller scores the winner against England in the 1970 World Cup

DPA/PA

 

However many times the game is replayed on television the score remains the same. Gerd Müller still volleys in the winning goal to send England crashing out of the Mexico World Cup in 1970.

England were 2-0 ahead and cruising to victory in the quarter final before two late West German goals sent the game into extra time. As England tired in the heat, Jürgen Grabowski beat Terry Cooper and sent in a deep cross. The ball was headed back across the goal and Müller pounced, contorting his body into a horizontal position to volley the ball past the England goalkeeper Peter Bonetti and into the roof of the net from close range.

“We played at midday. It was 110 degrees and England thought they had already won it,” Müller recalled. “They took off Bobby Charlton. They wanted to save him for the next game. What a present! So Franz Beckenbauer moved into midfield. Big mistake by England.”

The moment that broke English hearts exemplified the diminutive West German’s unerring instinct for a goal in a career during which he had some claim to being the greatest goalscorer in the game.

The statistics certainly support the case of the man known as “Der Bomber”. He scored nearly 400 goals for Bayern Munich in 453 appearances. At international level his record was simply astonishing: 68 goals in 62 appearances for West Germany.

 

There would be more heartbreak for England. In 1972 Müller’s last-minute goal at Wembley in a European Championship quarter final sealed an emphatic 3-1 win: Germany’s first on English soil and still regarded as one of the nation’s greatest footballing achievements.

 

Müller was only 5ft 8in tall, but his muscular legs gave him explosive speed over short distances and a surprising spring, enabling him to outjump taller defenders. With his squat physique and low centre of gravity, he could twist and turn sharply in tight spaces in the opposition penalty area.

His most important goal — the winner in the 1974 World Cup final on home soil against the Netherlands — was classic Müller, in one movement controlling a pass that was behind him and swivelling his body to somehow get in a right-foot shot with minimal backlift.

Müller later claimed that West Germany had won the 1974 World Cup after he and his close friend and room-mate Beckenbauer had persuaded the manager, Helmut Schön, to change the team, which had made a poor start to the tournament. Müller described his understanding on the pitch with Beckenbauer as telepathic. “He would stroll through the midfield looking for me, brushing the ball with the sole of his boot until he was ready to curl a long, low pass to exactly where I wanted it.”

Unlike his great friend, Müller was criticised for drifting out of games and contributing little to team play. As the original “fox in the box”, however, he was there when it mattered to score goals. “I seem to sense when a defender is going to relax or make a mistake,” he once said. “Something inside me says, ‘Gerd, go this way, Gerd go that way.’ I don't know what it is.”

 

Gerhard Müller, the son of a lorry driver, was born in Nördlingen, northern Bavaria, a few months after the end of the Second World War in 1945.

Like so many young German boys of his generation his passion for football was triggered by West Germany’s sensational, and totally unexpected, victory over the mighty Hungarians in the 1954 World Cup final.

The following year, as a ten-year old, he joined the youth team of the local amateur side, TSV Nördlingen. Initially he failed to impress the coaches there, one of whom advised him that he would never make a living out of football and told him to concentrate on his teenage job in a textile mill. Müller responded by scoring 48 goals in a season as an 18-year-old striker for Nördlingen. His feats persuaded Bayern Munich to take a chance and he signed with them in 1964.

Initially the coach, Tschick Cajkovski, was not impressed, nicknaming Müller “the weightlifter” on account of his being overweight. Müller only made his debut on the insistence of the club president, but the goals soon flowed.

In his first full season at Bayern he scored 35 times to help the club to win promotion to the first division of the newly established Bundesliga. He followed up the next season with another 15 goals in 33 matches. Fortunately for England it was October 1966 before he forced his way into the national side, three months after West Germany had narrowly lost the World Cup final to England at Wembley. He scored four times in a 6-0 drubbing of Albania in April 1967, but only became a regular in the national side in the 1969-70 season.

 

Müller’s international opportunities were, at first, limited because the German captain, Uwe Seeler, whose style of play resembled Müller’s, held the central striker's role. Seeler’s eventual withdrawal to a midfield role to make way for Müller was to make the Germans a much more potent attacking threat at the Mexico World Cup in 1970. Müller scored ten times in six matches in the tournament. Apart from the goal that knocked out England, he scored another two in a dramatic losing encounter with Italy in the semi-final. The Germans were furious at what they saw as biased refereeing and dirty play by the Italians, prompting Müller to complain to his captain, Beckenbauer, at one point: “We are being cheated.”

 

Müller’s contribution to national success over the next four years was just as impressive as his performance in 1970. After Germany’s elimination of England in the 1972 European Championships, they went on to beat the Soviet Union 3-0 in the final. Inevitably, of course, Müller scored twice. That team, with Müller as its cutting edge, is today regarded by most Germans as the best to have represented the country.
 

In the 1974 World Cup, on home soil, Müller’s goalscoring achievements were less spectacular: four goals in all. Yet the fourth, and last, was the crucial one, securing victory against the apparently superior Dutch, who included the world’s best player at the time, Johan Cruyff. Hours after the game, Müller, still only 29, announced his impending retirement from international football.

 

He carried on playing for Bayern Munich until 1978. In all for the German side he won three successive European Cups, four Bundesliga titles, four German Cups and one European Cup Winners’ Cup. He was seven times Bundesliga top scorer, twice won the “Golden Boot” for European top scorer in domestic football and in 1970 was voted European footballer of the year.

 

Like many of his contemporaries Müller followed the lucrative trail to a footballing swansong in America. He played for the Fort Lauderdale Strikers in Florida for three seasons before finally retiring in 1982 and returning home.

As several business ventures failed he slid into alcoholism. His marriage to Uschi broke up and he became estranged from his daughter, Nicole. Beckanbaeur and another former team-mate, Uli Hoeness, came to his rescue. He spent weeks in rehab in Austria, where his withdrawal symptoms from alcohol became so violent that at one point he was put into a straitjacket. Out of rehab, he was given a job as assistant trainer of Bayern Munich’s amateur team. The love and respect with which he was held there was obvious in 1995, at a 50th birthday party held by the club in his honour. Paying tribute, Beckenbauer said that without Müller Bayern would never have amounted to anything. Everyone in the room — players of the quality of Paul Breitner and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge — gave him a standing ovation.

 

Müller was reconciled with his wife and daughter, who survive him. In 2015 he had Alzheimer’s disease diagnosed.

 

Müller in 2010. In later years he recovered from alcoholism to become a coach at Bayern Munich

DOMINIC BARNARDT/GETTY IMAGES

 

Having been a man who always knew where the goal was, he wore thick spectacles in later years. Yet an air of Teutonic invincibility remained. He told Sue Mott in The Daily Telegraph in 1996: “The longest run I ever went without scoring a goal was three, maybe four matches. I do not remember a crisis of confidence. Ever.”

 

Gerd Müller, footballer, was born on November 3, 1945. He died on August 15, 2021, aged 75

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/gerd-mueller-obituary-c6br2vggq