So deep was the scar of losing the 1974 Word Cup final to the Germans that Johan Cruyff nearly flung a stubbed cigarette at a Spanish journalist who asked him to relive the defeat. But in his mellow years, he would chide himself and his teammates: “We’d have won if one of us was a German.” Cruyff’s total footballers lacked neither skill nor personality compared to the Germans, but they lacked, according to him, “the character and resilience.”
“Every time I see them win a World Cup, I wonder where they buy those (traits) from?…” he’d say whenever Germany won the Cup, and in his own lifetime he had seen them claim four. The Dutch legend,who died in 2016, would have repeated the same lines, if he’d seen Toni Kroos, with a stupendous free kick, rescue the defending champions from the brink of elimination. Just imagine being in Kroos’s boots or his mind before he twisted the knife straight through the heart of Sweden’s indefatigable yellow wall, and plunged their raucous supporters into mourning.
Down to 10 men, their physical and mental reserves drained, Kroos, and Germany, were clutching at the proverbial last strand of straw, his own fate oscillating between Ronaldo-like majesty and Messi-like recrimination, more so the latter as he was already culpable of giving the ball away that put Sweden in front.
But Kroos, hiding in his boyish smirk, was a composed man, plotting the deception, conceiving the flight, calculating the curl, imagining the bewildered eyes of the goalkeeper, as the ball swerved past him into the shivery net.
The ingenuity, execution and technical perfection of the shot was lost in the drama of the moment. For starters, he had to lift the ball over the scattered wall, bend it just enough to beat the goalkeeper. Kroos knew the angle was so acute that he rolled the ball to Marcos Reus inside the box, who killed it dead, allowing Kroos to have a less-populated path, though he still had to swerve the ball to beat both the wall and the ‘keeper, which he did with laser-guided precision.
Perhaps, the biggest tribute to the goal on social media came not from sentences, but monosyllabic words. Former Formula One world champion Nico Rosberg tweeted: “Yessssss…” His former club Bayern Munich wrote: “Krooooosssss.” The baffled Piers Morgan yelled: “Whoooaa”. Commentators world over were lost for words. It pleased the normally hard-to-please former German skipper Lothar Matthäus no less: “This goal (from Kroos) is as important as the goals in the World Cup final in 54, 74, 90 & 2014. We had the Kaiser Franz Beckenbauer, now we have King Toni Kroos! I’m very happy for him.”