Ballack Aims to Make Final Cut
He is a big, broad-shouldered, handsome man, lantern-jawed, dark-haired and light-eyed. The kind of man who stares down from billboards or up from the pages of glossy magazines. The kind that causes some women to swoon.
And the owners of some soccer teams too.
Chelsea fell for him. Roman Abramovich, the English Premier League team’s billionaire Russian owner, three weeks ago agreed to pay Michael Ballack $11 million a year to play in London next season instead of staying in Munich.
Ballack, no fool, agreed. But he made Chelsea court him, and the courtship took a while.
For the moment, though, Ballack remains in Germany, the only world-class player on Germany’s World Cup team. Ballack is nursing a right calf injury, but there is unfinished business to do here, business that went south at the last hurdle four years ago.
Flash back to the semifinals of the 2002 World Cup, a tournament jointly staged by South Korea and Japan, and Germany is playing South Korea at sold-out Seoul World Cup Stadium.
The score is tied, 0-0, but Coach Rudi Voeller’s team is coming under increasing pressure from the Koreans, who are being spurred on by tens of thousands of screaming, red-clad fans.
Only 20 minutes or so remain when Lee Chun-Soo sets off on a goal-bound run. Ballack has little option. He breaks up the play by deliberately fouling Lee. Swiss referee Urs Meier immediately shows Ballack a yellow card.
Minutes later, Ballack scores the game winner, sending Germany into the final against Brazil, a final Ballack has to sit out because he had a yellow card in a previous game.
There is bitterness from Ballack. “My dream was to play in the final,” he said.
Elsewhere, there is praise.
“Even though he knew that with another yellow card he would miss the final, he still committed that tactical foul that was absolutely necessary,” said Voeller, a World Cup winner in 1990. “He placed himself at the service of the team and the whole of Germany.”
In the quarterfinals, Ballack had broken American hearts, scoring to give Germany a 1-0 victory in a game in which the U.S. more than held its own.
Later, in the final at Yokohama, Ballack could only watch and wonder what might have been as Ronaldo scored twice to give Brazil its fifth world championship and deny Germany its fourth.
For a youngster born in Gorlitz, near the Polish border in what was then East Germany, Ballack, 29, has made a long journey.
His career has taken him from an unfashionable team, FC Chemnitzer, which he joined at 14 in 1990, to more respectable Kaiserslautern, where he won a Bundesliga title in 1998, to even more competitive Bayer Leverkusen, which he helped to reach the European Champions League final in 2002, and then to Bayern Munich, the New York Yankees of German soccer.
It was with Bayern that Ballack came into his own. He was the midfield linchpin of a team that won both the Bundesliga championship and the German Cup in 2003, 2005 and 2006.
Along the way, he became one of the most highly regarded midfielders in the world, a player equally committed to attacking and defending, a player who could turn a game with a powerful shot or a twisting header. He was Germany’s player of the year in 2002, 2003 and 2005.
Ballack became a favorite of the fans and the media -- especially when he wore the national team colors. He made his debut for his country in 1999 and has since scored 31 goals for Germany in 65 international matches, few of them bigger than those he scored against the U.S. and South Korea four years ago.
But 2002 remains an unfinished symphony that only victory in 2006 can complete.
On Friday evening, in Munich, Germany begins the quest to win back the Cup on its own soil when it plays Costa Rica in the 32-nation tournament’s opening game.
Because Germany is the host, it did not have to qualify for the tournament, but its current team is short on serious competitive game experience and fans are dubious about its prospects.
The team, rebuilt and reshaped under Coach Juergen Klinsmann, has had mixed results in its preparatory games. For example, it was crushed by Italy, 4-1, this spring but then turned around and routed the U.S. by the same score. It had to come from behind to tie Japan, 2-2, last week, then rebounded to defeat Colombia, 3-0, three days later.
Such inconsistency has caused Ballack to speak out, even if it meant putting him at odds with his coach.
After the Japan game, Ballack said Germany’s defense needed help.
“We are always making the same mistakes and we have the same problems in defense,” he told Kicker magazine.
“We have a very, very attacking style, as we showed against Japan, but we are losing too much possession....We should be concentrating on our defense.”
Klinsmann was not fazed. “It is absolutely a good thing when players express their opinions,” he said.
Thus encouraged, Ballack spoke out again. This time it seemed as if he was purposely trying to lower expectations in case things go horribly wrong for the World Cup hosts.
“We don’t have the choice of players we had in the 1990 World Cup or in the 1996 European Championship” both won by Germany, Ballack said in Wednesday’s edition of several Berlin newspapers. “Those sides had a lot more established players with international experience.
“As a result, our team makes mistakes and is not fixed. For that reason, I think there is a little uncertainty as we head into the tournament.”
On paper, the first round should not cause any problems for the Germans. After Friday’s game against Costa Rica, Ballack and company play Poland at Dortmund on Wednesday and Ecuador at Berlin on June 20.
Ballack says he hopes the team does not look too far ahead.
“With supposedly smaller nations such as Ecuador and Costa Rica, there is always the danger that you don’t show them enough respect,” he told World Soccer magazine. “It’s a trap we must not fall into.”
The trap is far more likely to be sprung in the second round.
That’s where, in all probability, England or Sweden will lie in wait, and both teams are more than capable of ending the young German team’s party before it has properly begun.
There would be some irony if it were England that ended Ballack’s World Cup hopes, or even if things turned out the other way around.
One of Ballack’s reasons for moving from Bayern Munich to Chelsea was not the money -- Manchester United had offered as much or more and Bayern would have matched most offers.
The real reason, he told England’s Guardian newspaper when he signed with Chelsea, was the “fighting spirit” of English clubs. “The game is about winning, the will to win,” he said.
The next month will show if Ballack can instill that same will in Germany.
