In one of the most extraordinary denials in the history of sport, Bayern Munich’s goalkeeper Oliver Kahn recently told the world: ”I am not the pope.”
Admittedly personnel at Bayern have a history of strange pronouncements (a few years ago the general manager, Uli Hoeness, told a press conference: ”I am not here to talk about football, I am here to talk about sausages”), but even so.
Kahn is undoubtedly a custodian of rare talent and courage. Few, in fact, would disagree with the words of German TV commentator Jorg Dahmann who observed during this year’s World Cup: ”Kahn is a great player and a great man. Just like Steffi Graf.” Despite that, it seems unlikely that many people would have confused him with the head of the Roman Catholic Church, even though Pope John Paul II once stood between the sticks back in Poland.
Thus, though a small group of pilgrims who’d been camping out on Kahn’s lawn in anticipation of a Christmas message of peace and reconciliation are said to have greeted his proclamation with dismay, most of us received the news with less surprise than if we had read that Sue Barker isn’t a flesh-eating Satanist, or that the 11 Englishmen currently in Australia are not a cricket team.
What then are we to make of Kahn’s sudden rebuttal of any suggestion that he may be the pontiff? Is it simply the result of being struck on the head by a golf ball during a fiery Bundesliga clash with Freiburg a few seasons back?
Or does it hint at something deeper and more universal, a dark force that lurks in the hearts of netminders, gnawing away at their souls with the relish of Sid Waddell chewing a polysyllabic adjective? After all, one former goalkeeper, David Icke (Hereford United), has already proclaimed himself Messiah.
A personal view is that it comes down to age. As Kevin Keegan sagely observed: ”Goalkeepers are not really born until they are in their 30s.”
Leaving aside the grisly images this conjures up (the terrible fights between Mr and Mrs Schmeichel as they argue over whose turn it is to change their 120kg son Peter’s nappy, the difficulties of potty training the 2,1m Edwin van der Sar) we can see immediately the problems this situation will lead to for the keepers themselves. Bluntly, they are men approaching middle age who find themselves surrounded by trendy young blades.
The unedifying consequences can be seen in David Seaman’s ever-lengthening ponytail (how long before he can wrap it round his neck and toss it over his shoulder like a boa?) and Bruce Grobbelaar’s hats.
Until recently Kahn appeared to have avoided these pitfalls. True he was notoriously bad-tempered, ultra-competitive and generally gave the impression he thought anger management meant yelling at people who work for you (”I fear only war and Oliver Kahn,” his teammate Mehmet Scholl once said) but otherwise he was a model of professionalism and sartorial sobriety.
Then, after his heroic performance in the 2001 European champions’ league final, Kahn suddenly changed. He took to wearing designer clothes. He grew a set of chisel-shaped sideburns. On a man of less ruddy complexion these might have appeared fashionable, instead they made the already bucolic German goalkeeper look like the sort of stout yeoman who might stride into a country pub rubbing his hands and crying heartily for a foaming stoop of the finest ale.
Fair enough, you may say, but whatever other effects the pressure of keeping up with hip young things like Freddie Ljungberg has had on Seaman he has not yet felt moved to deny being the Archbishop of Canterbury. True enough, but there is added weight on the broad shoulders of Oliver Kahn.
That old chestnut about how there aren’t the characters in the game anymore is nowhere truer than at the club the German press sarcastically refer to as ”FC Hollywood”. Stefan Effenberg, whose history of characterful behaviour reached its apotheosis when Germans paid him the signal honour of naming an obscene gesture after him (from the Cruyff Turn to the ”Effie”, a stiff-fingered salute — and they say standards of behaviour are falling, I ask you) has left. Mario Basler has moved on. Lothar Matthäus has retired. Scholl has calmed down since the days when he announced that members of the German Green Party should be hanged from trees.
As Bayern’s controversial legend Paul Breitner said: ”You should not think that just because they come from Brazil they are Brazilians.” Likewise just because a man plays for Bayern it doesn’t automatically make him an obnoxious playboy. Some skills you have to work at.
Faced with a shortfall, the ultra-professional Kahn is single-handedly attempting to maintain the standards of bad behaviour set by the club down the years. His efforts — from throttling opponents to turning up in discos when he was supposed to be injured — have been heroic.
And he is being pilloried for it. Linford Christie once bemoaned his fate thus: ”I could have been a god, but people only allow you to get so far in this country.” The same is clearly true in Germany. Especially if you aren’t the pope. —