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40 years ago: Euro '72 final

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    40 years ago: Euro '72 final

    Forty years ago, on 18 June 1972, West Germany beat the USSR 3-0 in the European Championship final in Brussels. That was possibly the best German team of all time; probably one of the best international teams ever.

    The timing of the victory was important for West German football, coming at the end of a season that began with the on-going revelations of the match-fixing scandal. In fact, there was little reason to expect at the beginning of the season that the Nationalelf would achieve what they did.

    West Germany had drawn the first qualifying game at home with Turkey, in October 1970. Five of the 1972 finalists played in that game. They struggled to a 1-0 win against Albania (an improvement on the draw which denied them qualification for the quarter finals in 1968). Things gradually improved, but the first sign of greatness was the penultimate game in Poland, against the team that would become Olympic champions a couple of months later. Eight of the 1972 finalists played in a 3-1 victory. The return match, with qualification assured, ended 0-0.

    Then came the quarterfinal against England. West Germany had some serious injury problems, with Vogts and Overath notable absentees, and Maier and Netzer going into the game with niggling injuries. The mood was one of resignation. Netzer recalls telling Franz Beckenbauer (who had only recently assumed the captaincy) that the side should be satisfied if they didn’t lose by more than five goals. At the time, Helmut Schön, not a man given to wild exaggeration or wily mindgames, commented that England were the overwhelming favourites.

    In the event, West Germany put on a show of short passes and penetrating long passes (courtesy of Günter Netzer, not the most industrious of players but a man of great skill and vision). The 3-1 win flattered England. Nine of the finalists played in that game; only Held and Grabowski didn’t make the cut (neither did the injured Vogts and Overath).

    So, with four finalists going through, one of them was chosen to host the three-game finals – Belgium. In the first semi, the USSR beat Hungary. In the other, in Antwerp, West Germany beat Belgium; it is said that the victory was much more comfortable than the 2-1 scoreline suggests; I don’t think a recording of the full game exists. Müller scored both goals.

    German TV viewers missed the first ten minutes or so of the game: kick-off was at 8pm, the same time the terrestrial ARD station had to show its (for once abbreviated) evening news.

    So the final was against the Soviet Union. By now there can’t have been any doubt about the outcome. A few weeks earlier, on 26 May, West Germany had beaten the same opponent 4-1 in the official opening match for Munich’s Olympic Stadium. Gerd Müller scored all four, in the space of 16 minutes.

    A few days before the final, RAF terrorist Ulrike Meinhof had been arrested (I mention that only because the thread in World), which was huge news in West Germany. Her news cycle fizzled out with West Germany’s 3-0 win. By the time West Germany reached the next Euro final, in 1976, she was dead.



    The German game was beautiful to watch; much more beautiful even than Spain’s tiki-taka (made possible of course by the kind of space given to players like Beckenbauer and Netzer). Müller scored two; the other was scored by midfield water-carrier Herbert “Hacki” Wimmer.

    The game wasn’t over yet when German fans staged a pitch invasion (did they think it was all over?). They were cleared off the field, with Sepp Maier’ manhandling assistance, and spent the remaining minutes on the side of the pitch. The second the ref blew the final whistle, they stormed the field, with the players running like hell for safety. At the trophy presentation, Helmut Schön almost forgot to lift the cup.

    The team: Maier, Beckenbauer, Höttges, Schwarzenbeck, Breitner, Wimmer, Netzer, Hoeness, Erwin Kremers, Heynckes, Müller.

    Of those, Maier, Beckenbauer, Schwarzenbeck, Breitner, Hoeness and Müller played in the 1974 final, with all the others but Kremers in the squad. Kremers, the young Schalke winger, had been dropped from Schön’s ’74 squad for the unforgivable crime of having received a red card in a Bundesliga match…

    Football has, it seems, changed a little bit since then…

    #2
    40 years ago: Euro '72 final

    Great stuff, G-Man. Was Kremers made bitter and twisted with hatred for Schoen because of this?

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      #3
      40 years ago: Euro '72 final

      Kremers always came across as a decent sort of fellow. If he had big resentments, I've not heard of him making these public.

      His twin, Helmut, made the '74 squad.

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        #4
        40 years ago: Euro '72 final

        Just watched this at the weekend on my 50 Greatest Euro games DVD. Yes, they crushed the Soviets, Netzer and Beckenbauer looking imperious - the long build up to the first goal was superb. The fans around the edge of the pitch at the end were an amazing site because it looks like an FA Cup tie at a provincial non-league ground.

        I was appalled they don't have the England-Germany first leg game on the DVD set - in fact there are way too few old games. It's one of the first live games I can remember watching, a huge treat on a midweek night for a seven-year-old. I remember the disbelief of the commentator as the green shirts absolutely wiped England off the pitch. Maybe that's when, subconsciously, the seeds of my Teutonic fixation were planted.

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          #5
          40 years ago: Euro '72 final

          Barry Davies (who maybe was that commentator) regularly cites that German side as his favourite. I think this game, rather than Poland 1973, was where the Ramsey era ended because had England qualified in '74 they would have looked like the dinosaurs they did in that game.

          Perhaps also: Ramsey's defensive tactics in the return leg were perceived as an admission that his time had gone.

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            #6
            40 years ago: Euro '72 final

            Yeah, good stuff G-Man.

            I dimly recall watching this live on a Sunday afternoon. I can't remember anything about the match itself, but can remember the crowd encroaching towards the game.

            For the 1/4 win at Wembley there was a sense of shock and awe afterwards. For England, it was the 70s equivalent of the Hungary game from 20 years earlier, although the shocks were not quite so seismic.

            It was only when I read Tor that I remembered how cool Germany seemed when I was a kid. It seemed so modern and futuristic compared to the grey north of England.

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              #7
              40 years ago: Euro '72 final

              Good post G-Man.

              Oddly for Ramsey he put out a midfield without a tackler for the Wembley match against West Germany. Now I am less a fan of Netzer than I was some of the midfielders who followed him, but put him in a team, liberate him for playmaking and fail to put in an opponent who could close him down and he would destroy you.

              Close him down and you could take him out the game, part of the reason he was always a little bit on the fringes for West Germany. Ramsey than compounded his error by playing a midfield without a creative player in the second game they had to win.

              Off on a tangent, were we to offer up individuals whose style as a manager could not have been more different from his style as a player, Alf Ramsey would be a good contender.

              Comment


                #8
                40 years ago: Euro '72 final

                Yeah, I re-watched this game recently too. I love that German side greatly. Always used to think of them in terms of Krautrock when I was younger, although now I appreciate that - on a personal level at least - that's rather like associating Emlyn Hughes with Nick Drake. Guess they'd all have been into their schlager, with the possible exception of Netzer (well, he had long hair) and Breitner (who presumably liked folk songs about power stations).

                Fantastic team though. Of course, in this country the general perception of those 70s German teams is that they were "ruthlessly efficient" and lacking in flair, a judgement which seems entirely based on comparison to contemporary Dutch sides (and even then, is off the mark). They may not have had too many soloists, which I think was the common 1970s English perception of "fancy football", but they were absolutely wonderful to watch.

                dalliance wrote:
                Off on a tangent, were we to offer up individuals whose style as a manager could not have been more different from his style as a player, Alf Ramsey would be a good contender.
                Winner: George Graham.

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                  #9
                  40 years ago: Euro '72 final

                  imp wrote: I was appalled they don't have the England-Germany first leg game on the DVD set - in fact there are way too few old games. It's one of the first live games I can remember watching, a huge treat on a midweek night for a seven-year-old. I remember the disbelief of the commentator as the green shirts absolutely wiped England off the pitch. Maybe that's when, subconsciously, the seeds of my Teutonic fixation were planted.
                  BILD reissued this match around Euro 2008 as part of a large reissue program with maybe 20 WC DVDs and 20 Euro DVDs.

                  http://www.amazon.de/Fussball-EM-Klassikersammlung-Deutsche-Viertelfinale-England-Deutschland/dp/B0019R5USU/ref=sr_1_3?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1340079594&sr=1-3

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