Franz Beckenbauer was handsome and elegant: Calligraphy, your name is Kaiser. And now Germany's greatest player passed away at 78, fifty days after Bobby Charlton and three after Mario Zagallo: the protagonists of an era are disappearing, one after the other. Franz had met Bobby in the '66 final, and with Mario (and Didier Deschamps) he had a rare record, granted only to the few: a World Cup won on the pitch and one on the bench.
It was the Libero, in all capital letters, the Bavarian son of a postman born a few months after the end of the war, with a refined appearance, a character who seems to come out of a canvas depicting Louis II, the mad king, in his walks around a fairytale castle, at a lake.
A much evoked – and in its own way heroic – image is that of Franz playing the legendary extra time of the Azteca, of the Match of the Century, of Italy-Germany 4-3, with an arm around his neck. The substitutions were over and it was a matter of gritting our teeth. Even in those moments his elegance, his lightness were not overwhelmed by the pain, by the asphyxiation of the heights.
Second in '66, on the day the Sun wrote “today at Wembley England plays the final of the World Cup, our national sport, against Germany. Come what may, in this century we have beaten them twice in their national sport”; third four years later at the World Cup in Mexico, Franz had his triumph in '74, in his home World Cup when Bild, with an excellent play on words thanks to the name of the coach, hailed the success over the revolutionary Netherlands with “Danke Schoen” . In reality it seems that the reins of command were firmly in the hands of Beckenbauer who designed a group with strong traction Bayern Munich, his club from start to finish, from youth to an honorary presidency which he maintained until his farewell.
It was the team of Sepp Maier, the goalkeeper who seemed to see him appear from the turret of a panzer, of Gerd Muller, the small center forward capable of inimitable twists and turns, of Wolfgang Overath with his always clear vision.
Linked to his club (with which he won three European Cups and two Ballon d'Ors) and to his homeland, Beckenbauer wanted to experiment with the first ephemeral attempts to transplant football to the USA and he ended up finding himself alongside Pele in the New York Cosmos. He returned to Germany, had an adventure in Hamburg but Bavaria continued to be the magnet that attracted him, irresistible.
Coach, won Italia '90 at the end of a bad final with Diego Armando Maradona's Argentina, decided by a dubious penalty converted by Brehme. It was the third World Cup that went to Germany, the second that the Kaiser had his hands on.
President of the organizing committee of the 2006 World Cup, he aspired to another success in yet another capacity. Lippi's Italy proved fatal to him as they defeated the Mannschaft in the other great shrine of German football, Dortmund.
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