Michael Ballack Retires from Professional Football
Michael Ballack’s retirement from
professional football has gone down without a lot of fanfare. Rather unfair this, as here was a man who bridged across 2 eras of German football and at
times held it up solely on his muscular shoulders when the European powerhouses
threatened to slip into a chasm of mediocrity. Make no mistake – German football
was in a crisis in the early noughties. The era of Klinsman, Mattheus and
Bierhoff was over. Bayern Munich lynchpin Effenberg was at odds with the
national team. To make matters worse, there was that night of terror in Munich
when Michael Owen ripped apart the old enemy in a 5-1 thrashing. At this time,
we in India read about a young man from Bayer Leverkusen named Ballack who was
scoring an extra-ordinary number of goals from his midfield position. A naturally gifted shooter off both feet , strong in the air and a penchant for the odd tasty challenge in defence, Ballack was to remain the engine room for the German national team for the entire decade.
2002 was his Annus
Mirabilis. His Leverkusen team defied all odds to reach the Uefa Champions league
final where they were taking the fight to the aristocrats of European Football,
Real Madrid. That is till Zinedine Zidane decided to take matters into his own
hands and unleash that left footed volley from the edge of the box. However,
the performance of his team had catapulted Ballack to superstar status, and he
lived up to his billing in the ensuing world cup. His crowning moment came in
the semi-finals against South Korea where he scored the winner however the game
would prove bittersweet as just before his goal a yellow card for a tactical
foul had ensured that he would miss the final. There is still speculation on
how the final would have panned out had his enforcing midfield presence been
there – as it happened Brazil cantered home thanks to a Ronaldo brace but German
football had found its newest superstar, and essentially the first since the
Klinsman-Mattheus days.
A rather injury curtailed latter
half of the decade, first with Bayern Munich and then with Chelsea probably
denied him from fulfilling all of that early promise of 2002. However, a
national team return of 42 goals from 98 international appearances is an
outstanding result for a midfielder. Much more acclaimed strikers have poorer
strike rates. Add to it a World Cup runners up and a third place finish along
with league titles in Germany and England and the baby-faced German easily
slots in as one of the classiest players of the previous decade.
The national team of today , with
the likes of Schwienstieger, Muller,
Goetze and Ozil have been predicted to accomplish great deeds – however this
team might never have been realised had they not emerged through that evolutionary
bottleneck of the early noughties, where at times the national team seemed
synonymous with the name Ballack. Hats off to a great career!
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