by Mesut Özil
But the joy didn’t last long, because Sebastian Freis scored for the second time that afternoon. And after a goal from Edmond Kapllani we were even behind for a long time before Sanogo scored the equaliser.
We won the next game against Energie Cottbus. After that our next match was the northern derby against Hamburger SV – one of the most heated games I’ve ever witnessed, if only from the bench. Everyone was fired up. Nobody ducked out of any tackle. As a Bremen player you couldn’t lose against Hamburg. It’s not allowed. And everyone on the team performed with this in mind – an impressive sight. Our physical presence on the pitch was just right. Everyone was running around as if to say to the opposition: ‘Nobody’s getting past me. What do you little Hamburgers want anyway?’ Everyone pursued the ball. Nobody rested even for a second. No run back was too strenuous.
Whenever our ball play wasn’t enough, there was pushing, barging and a bit of provocation. Daniel Jensen swore. Tim Borowski jostled. Hugo Almeida mouthed off at his opponent. Attempts at intimidation! But the Hamburgers put up resistance. Paolo Guerrero elbowed Tim Wiese. Vincent Kompany went hard at Diego in the same way.
At the start of the second half Frank Baumann was shown the red card for holding on to Rafael van der Vaart’s shirt. Soon after Jurica Vranješ was also sent off after his hand found its way into Timothée Atouba’s face. In addition we got five yellow cards and Hamburg three. ‘There were scenes straight out of a wrestling bout,’ Ivan Klasnić said afterwards.
We’d been leading 1–0 since the fiftieth minute, thanks to a dream goal by Hugo Almeida. On the ground, Daniel Jensen had poked the ball towards Almeida, who stepped back, surrounded by five Hamburg players, struck the ball perfectly from 17 metres and saw it disappear into the corner of the net.
Tim Wiese was responsible for the biggest talking-point of the day, however. In the forty-second minute a high ball flew towards his box. Because Naldo didn’t challenge the advancing Iva Olić, Wiese had to intervene. He rushed out of his goal to the edge of the box and leaped with his right foot in the air – at the same level as Olić’s head. With his studs pointing outwards he went for the ball and did hit it, but in the process crashed into the HSV attacker’s shoulder.
The Hamburg team and the media went for Tim Wiese afterwards, accusing him of watching bad karate films the night before. The foul was judged to be ‘attempted grievous bodily harm’. He’d charged out of his goal like a madman and committed the ‘most brutal foul of the season’. After the game Wiese explained that he’d hit the ball first and that Olić ‘didn’t have to go for it. He ran straight into me.’ Bild thought his statement was ‘twaddle’.
To begin with Klaus Allofs tried to defend Wiese’s challenge, for which he was only yellow-carded, by saying, ‘A yellow card is absolutely right. I mean, Tim was going for the ball.’ But after hearing the general opinion on the kung fu kick, he backpedalled. ‘We couldn’t have complained if the ref had sent him off.’
When Franz Beckenbauer, in his role as TV pundit, claimed that Wiese’s challenge was ‘almost attempted murder’, the hostility escalated. Comparisons were made with Harald (Toni) Schumacher’s attack in 1982 against France’s Patrick Battiston, who’d lost several teeth in the process. And also with Eric Cantona’s kick when he attacked Crystal Palace fan Matthew Simmons off the pitch.
Referee Lutz Wagner, whose yellow card was wrong – as a teammate I’m prepared to say that – admitted the next day, ‘I slept badly. It won’t leave me in peace. Having seen the TV pictures I have to say I ought to have sent him off.’ And yet Tim Wiese was defended by Toni Schumacher, who, as a goalkeeper, was voted Germany’s Footballer of the Year in 1984 and 1986. ‘In the heat of the moment all you see is the ball and you don’t have any time to think about injuring people. If someone accuses him of attempted murder, that’s bullshit!’
From then on we were known as the ‘kicking squad’. Also because we’d had seven red cards so far that season. People even spoke of Werder’s image being tarnished.
There are teams that will be unsettled by things like this. Teams that lose their focus on the essentials, wasting energy that’s urgently needed elsewhere on re-evaluating and justifying the incident. But not Werder. In their calm way Klaus Allofs and Thomas Schaaf prepared us for the final sprint of the season. We were in second place, on course to qualify automatically for the Champions League, two points ahead of my ex-club Schalke 04. My former teammates were no longer being coached by Mirko Slomka, however. In the wake of our 5–1 victory over Schalke, Slomka was sacked. Mike Büskens and Youri Mulder took over.
In the first game after Wiese’s kung fu performance we showed that we weren’t a kicking or fighting squad, but that the longstanding admiration for our combination football was justified. Against Hannover, who’d also wanted to sign me, we produced an incredible spectacle. Hugo Almeida, Tim Borowski, Ivan Klasnić, Markus Rosenberg and Aaron Hunt all scored in our 6–1 victory. Everything was all right again with the media; we were praised and flattered for our performance. Because Schalke defeated Frankfurt 1–0, they were still on our tail and theoretically had the chance to overtake us in the last round of matches. Even a draw, however, would automatically qualify us for the Champions League.
In the end we managed a victory, Rosenberg scoring ten minutes before the end. Another goal close to the final whistle. No other team in the Bundesliga had scored more goals – 18 – in the last 15 minutes of matches. This was down to Schaaf, who taught us always to maintain our concentration until the whistle went.
When referee Michael Kempter blew the final whistle, Ivan Klasnić was on the pitch. Half an hour before the end, Schaaf had brought him on for Hugo Almeida. This quite individual man. Ivan, the warrior. The bold. The indestructible! A man you simply have to marvel at.
Ivan didn’t play football for almost the entire year of 2007 due to illness. His kidneys had stopped functioning and he was fearful for his career and his life. Compared to kidney disease any other football injury is a joke. His body was no longer able to rid itself of toxins. Klasnić’s body rejected the kidney donated by his mother, after which he received one from his father and this time the transplant worked. And then he actually returned to playing – the first professional footballer to do so after such a procedure. I played with him on seven occasions and was able to see how this impressive man never lost his cheerfulness or bottle.
As a footballer you rarely have serious doubts about your body. You toil every day to turn it into a high-performance machine, to strengthen the muscles, ensure that your motor functions are working smoothly and keep the tendons and ligaments stable. When you take a shower in the mornings you see a well-trained body, tailor-made for the exertions of training that will follow. When you return home in the afternoon you might be tired, but you’ve proved that your body is functioning well.
Because you feel so strong you don’t think about injuries or hazards; you go for every tackle in both training and matches. You trust in the fact that your body’s going to hold up. But Klasnić’s example shows that even a well-trained body can have its weaknesses that you can do nothing about. It doesn’t matter how many kilometres you run, or sit-ups and press-ups you do.
I love playing football. For me it’s the best thing in the world. If I could I’d keep playing for all eternity. But that’s not going to happen. At some point my body will start to show weaknesses. And I dread it. I’d love to remain at the level I’m playing at now, but I know that’s impossible.
Together with Ivan Klasnić I was a runner-up in my first season with Werder. Which meant that in my first two years as a professional my team had come second in the Bundesliga. Contrary to Andreas Müller’s predictions, I’d actually spent more time on the pitch in my first six months with Werder than I had in the first half of the season with Schalke 04. Thomas Schaaf gave me 615 minutes in the Bundesliga, whereas at Schalke I’d played for 558.
These two years had seemed as if they’d been on permanent fast-forwa
rd. At Schalke I was part of the turmoil there – the plaything, the object of hostility. I learned to suppress stuff, swallow it, ignore it and to deal with slurs. In Bremen I learnt how things can be different. How much backing a club can give its players.
Thomas Schaaf and Klaus Allofs never let the injuries, the squabbles inside the squad or transfer rumours, which were permanent companions of the season, get to them. They had an impressively calm manner, which meant that Werder didn’t suffer any long-lasting damage.
I can’t imagine any other club managing to get through a season with such fluctuations. It might sound corny, but we really did veer between genius and insanity. This period included an 8–1 win against Bielefeld as well as a 6–3 defeat against Stuttgart. On good days we beat Real Madrid; on bad ones we couldn’t muster a chance against Olympiakos Piräus. We scored 75 goals but also received seven red cards. And at the end Werder qualified for the Champions League for the fifth season in succession.
It was my great fortune to be able to mature for two years in Diego’s slipstream. Diego has this relaxed interaction with the ball. It doesn’t bounce off his foot. It sticks to his thigh, even to his head if he so wishes. Even at top speed he keeps the ball incredibly close to him. He’s a magician who’s unbelievably effective. And, most of all, in spite of this he’s a real team player, without vanity, and never regards himself as too important to help out in defence either.
I had some incredibly frustrating training sessions when I performed textbook tackles on Diego yet was still unable to win the ball. I’d be on his right foot and he’d flick the ball to his left. I’d try to attack there and he’d dodge out of the way. As a teammate, he was often sheer pleasure to watch. As an opponent, he could do your head in with his close ball control and cheeky dribbling. But that was so important for me. In every session I not only had to keep up but also play at his tempo. He demanded double passes. He demanded you make runs. If you didn’t do what he wanted, he’d roll his eyes in disdain. Sometimes in the evenings I’d watch his tricks in slow motion, to try to make sense of them.
After training I’d often stay out on the pitch with him and Naldo, and we’d have free-kick competitions. Naldo used pure power, whereas Diego bent his unbelievably. He regularly stroked the ball over the wall.
The longer I was at Bremen, the more I became part of the ‘Werder midfield diamond’. This ingenious creation, the lynchpin of the team. With wonderful players such as the precision passing machine Diego, the strategist Frank Baumann or the ringleader Torsten Frings.
10
Victory in the German Cup
How to swallow defeat
In my second year at Werder they even started calling me Messi. ‘Diego’s important for us, but Messi plays really well too,’ Frings once said publicly in an interview.
The Argentinian Lionel Messi is almost a year and a half older than me. At the age of 24 he became the record goal scorer at Barcelona. Twelve months later he’d already scored more than 200 goals in the Spanish league. Between 2009 and 2012 he was International Footballer of the Year four times in a row.
In Bremen, of course, I was miles away from this. Although I must admit that it’s my goal to win this accolade one day. Jumping ahead, when I later joined Real Madrid, my coach José Mourinho said very clearly to me, ‘If you don’t become international footballer of the year one day that would be disappointing.’ And that’s how I see it too. I’ve set myself the ambition of being awarded this distinction. It’s a real incentive. But more about that later.
Because before I actually began with Real Madrid there were more lessons to learn at Bremen – some minor and some major.
In the summer of 2008, Patrick Owomoyela, Ivan Klasnić, Pierre Womé and Tim Borowski left us. Claudio Pizarro came from Chelsea and we signed Sebastian Prödl too. I also went on my first pre-season training trip with Bremen, sharing a room with Sebastian Mielitz. Up till then he’d been playing for Werder’s U-19 team and had now made it into the professional squad. The older players – stars like Frings, Pizarro or Wiese – had their own single rooms. We younger players didn’t enjoy such privileges. On the first evening I lay down on my bed. We’d trained hard, I’d eaten and already had my massage. The television was on and I was watching one TV series after the other, as I usually did to combat the boredom in the hotel. Sebastian Mielitz didn’t have his massage till later, then came into the room at around 9 p.m. and watched a bit of telly with me. After no more than half an hour he asked me to turn the television off. ‘I have to sleep. We’ve got important training tomorrow,’ he said. I waited for him to burst out laughing or pull some other face. But, no, he was being deadly serious. ‘Look, mate,’ I said, ‘I haven’t got a laptop with me. It’s half-past nine; I can’t kip for twelve hours.’ But Mielitz didn’t care. He was a big sleeper. And he really wanted to go to bed at half-past nine.
It was a trivial matter, of course. Completely insignificant. But you have to get over such petty things together. Most young professionals in the Bundesliga share a room. Which means you have to engage with each other and be tolerant, even when someone wants to go to bed at a ridiculous hour. I gave Mielitz my headphones and asked him whether they blanked out the noise. With that the matter was sorted.
Although we were all satisfied with our pre-season preparation, we had a poor start to the season. We only managed draws against Bielefeld and Schalke. In Gladbach we were 3–0 down in the middle of the second half, and finished up just 3–2. A beginning unworthy of last season’s runners-up.
I set up a goal against Cottbus as I had in our 1–1 draw against Schalke. Then, in our fifth match, we beat Bayern 5–2 in Munich, with me assisting the first two goals of the game, by Markus Rosenberg and Naldo. I scored the third myself, to make it 3–0, hammering it into the corner from 15 metres. It was a very special day for me. Not many players put five past the German record-holders at their home ground. Many teams are happy enough to come away from the Allianz Arena with a draw, but we dictated the rhythm and determined what happened on the pitch. Against world-class players such as Philipp Lahm, Bastien Schweinsteiger, Zé Roberto and Luca Toni.
So I’d had a pretty good start to the season, in which I’d be in the starting line-up for 20 games. By the end of it I’d managed three goals and 15 assists. I would have been pleased with this, had it not been for our disastrous performance in the league. Only once did we get as high as third in the table, then finished in an unacceptable tenth place. But instead of beating ourselves up about our poor showing in the league, we salvaged the season in a different way. We forgot the many bad weeks through some good ones.
We masked our problems by shining at key moments. When it counted we were on it. In the aforementioned Champions League game against Inter Milan, for example. This was the match after which I told my agent that at some point in my career I would play under Mourinho.
Following the game, Inter’s coach got a bit of a roasting from the German media. ‘Werder shuts up big mouth Mourinho,’ Bild said. The Portuguese star manager had been bragging at the pre-match press conference, saying, for example, ‘There’s none better than me.’ He also snapped at a reporter because he didn’t like his question. ‘I expect you wanted to become a football manager, but only made it as far as a journalist.’ And he spoke provocatively about the media speculation over his salary at Inter: ‘They’re always talking about nine million euros. It’s not that little. I get eleven. With sponsorship money it goes up to fourteen million.’
Once again Mourinho had bagged the headlines for himself over the next few days. And I’m pretty sure that this was his plan. Given the experience I’ve had of him at Real, I suspect he wanted to distract attention away from other things – there could have been problems within the Inter Milan team – injuries, discussions about the formation or something else. At any rate, when we worked together in Madrid he often behaved like that. Mourinho would already know in the evening if the two big Spanish daily sports papers were going to lay i
nto the team the following morning. He knew if Marca or As were going to turn against us, which would have unsettled the team. So he would attempt a diversionary tactic. He didn’t care if the counter-attack ended up being at his own expense and his image suffered as a result of supposedly provocative comments. He was an interceptor, without whom the team would never have escaped unscathed, nor could we have gone about our work in peace.
Another occasion where Bremen shone was in January 2009. In the last 16 of the German Cup we were up against Borussia Dortmund, the previous year’s runners-up. For Dortmund the game against us was the prelude to celebrations to mark the club’s 100-year anniversary. But we had no intention of turning up like good guests and handing out presents.
At the start of the match, however, that’s exactly what it looked like we’d come to do. Alex Frei put Dortmund into the lead with an early goal, and then we gave him and Mohamed Zidan five other major opportunities to score. Only after that did we rally and play with a confidence that didn’t match our position in the table. First Hugo Almeida scored, followed by Claudio Pizarro. Which clinched our quarter-final spot.
There we faced VfL Wolfsburg, who had enjoyed the best start to the second half of the season, winning four games and drawing one. They’d scored ten goals and conceded only three. By contrast, we hadn’t won a single league game since the turn of the year, bagging only two miserable points and scoring three goals, even though we’d had 103 attempts. Our accuracy was diabolical; we were just shooting wildly and indiscriminately.