From the ROLLING STONE archive 2016:
The ball bounces down from the bottom edge of the crossbar. Wolfgang Weber beheads him. Gottfried Dienst runs to Tofik Bachramov. The Soviet Russian linesman says something and points to the center line, then the Swiss referee also points to the center line. Goal for England in extra time in the 1966 World Cup final!
England were world champions. And “West Germany” had lost. That was almost 60 years ago now, but in the Federal Republic people still swear with great fervor that Geoff Hurst’s shot at Wembley “wasn’t in”, i.e. it didn’t fully cross the goal line before it jumped up again and caught the Cologne central defender Weber headed it over the crossbar.
Uwe Seeler whistled his comrades back
Of course, it can feel like an existential difference for a soccer player whether he is a “world champion” or not. In our winner-take-all understanding of sport, even runner-up world champion is the opposite of world champion. So you have to look at that separately. Socially and culturally, however, it is small-minded that people have been reflexively insisting on the irregularity of the third gate for half a century.
The fact that the then Federal President Heinrich Lübke (CDU) was the only German to say “The ball was in!” in 1966 is still blamed more on him than his Nazi past. And the fact that Bakhramov got a statue in front of the national stadium of Azerbaijan, the “Tofik Bakhramov Stadium”, also triggers fantasies of violence in pacifist, multicultural football fans. It is to be feared that by the anniversary on July 30th it will be shown countless times in all available camera angles that the ball wasn’t actually in there.
Revanchism is over, Silesia will no longer be ours
What is the point of this, other than a self-righteous feeling of stab in the back that our German team was not defeated on the football field, but rather cheated by an infamous Soviet Russian of Azerbaijani origin and betrayed by a cowardly Swiss? Revanchism is over. Silesia will no longer be ours either. Nobody wants that anymore, thank God. And this game is over too, folks. It will not be canceled or repeated any more than the battle in the Teutoburg Forest, no matter how much Varus and the Romans quarrel with it.
You certainly can’t claim the category of justice, because in football it’s not justice that wins, but the winner. Although defeat is sometimes considered unfair, victory is never unfair; at best, it is “not undeserved”. This is the euphemism for incredible coincidence, which is a constitutive element of the game. See Germany’s World Cup victory in 1954. This is then justified with “morale” or “team spirit” or the choice of hotel (“spirit of Spiez”), but never with the fact that our Liebrich injured the super Hungarian Puskas in the preliminary round game so much that he didn’t afterwards could walk properly anymore.
If the Germans could sue for a World Cup victory in 1966 on the basis of a fairness clause, then the Hungarians in 1954 (blatant injustice) and the Dutch in 1974 (Schwalbe Hölzenbein) could do so with at least as much right. Even the Argentines in 1990 could claim that extra time had to be played when the score was 0-0 because Brehme’s penalty goal came from Völler’s Schwalbe.
For this text, I conducted an unrepresentative survey as to whether, after 50 years, Germans are ready to stop complaining that the ball wasn’t in the ball. Great outrage. Two reasons: The ball wasn’t in there after all. And the English are stupid.
Certainly some English people have been annoying all these years with their constant innuendos (“One World Cup, two World Wars”) and their football war tabloid headlines (“Surrender, Fritz!”), but you have to classify that correctly from a social psychological perspective. As compensation for envy. In addition to everything else, Germany is also a football giant that has won four World Cup titles, the last one in South America. In addition to everything else, England is also a football dwarf that has never broken anything, except once at the home World Cup. He talks about his former greatness, which will never return unless as part of our future common EU team.
So it’s high time to overcome the revanchism, the injustice-wrangling, the snobby finger-pointing and the narrow-mindedness of definitions and to show the sovereignty and greatness of those who can afford it. By the way, everyone knows that a goal is scored when the referee blows his whistle.
Congratulations and celebrations, dear English people: The ball was in!