Thomas Müller is known as one of the deadliest penalty-takers in contemporary football, in which many a tournament is settled with a spot-kick shootout, perhaps the most nerve-wracking experience any player, manager, or fan can endure. His reputation for cool and effective finishing and goal-scoring is legendary. Put yourself in the boots of the goalkeeper above, and you will probably just be praying that Müller doesn’t completely humiliate you by shooting straight between your legs. But that is not what happens this time
One of the reasons Brazil has won more World Cups than any other nation is that all of their players learn some capoeira, the 500-year-old Brazilian martial art developed by slaves, pirates, and gangsters. The central concept of capoeira is that of mandinga, trickery, treachery. A razor blade between the toes, hidden by bell bottoms, is a trademark weapon that illustrates the principle. And there is a swing from the hips, the ginga, which underlies all of capoeira, and which Ronaldinho himself proclaimed as the supreme secret of Brazilian football.
In the above scenario, Thomas Muller has, in a split second, assessed his chances of scoring in a virtually open-goal situation and calculated that the keeper is sufficiently concentrated on him to enable an even more secure finish. He produces a true mandinga kick, a pass to a completely unseen striker to his right that totally bamboozles the keeper. This is the result, with all the defenders acting merely as distant spectators:
And this is the only result Thomas Müller cares about. In an era in which increasingly complex team strategies have to mesh with the increasingly overblown talents and egos of individual superstars, Müller has genuinely created a whole new mediating niche and role for himself. He describes himself as a Raumdeuter, or “space interpreter”, as it’s usually been rendered — “space invader” for one clever pundit, “space explorer” for others. I’ve given an alternative translation for this term deuter in the title of this story: it is also used in the sense of being an oracle, a diviner. And that is exactly what Thomas Müller is: he reads and interprets the gestalt of the game and instantaneously intuits a space for himself or for his colleagues from which one of them can score.
This is why he is so clever to declare his superpower. That’s exactly how it functions. The more you mark him, the more he can lead you astray to allow his incredibly talented colleagues to score. You can see it operating clearly in the picture above. He shows not the slightest sign that he’s even aware of a player on his right, everything he is doing is leading the goalkeeper the other way, to provide his teammate with a sitting duck of a goal. The more his myth grows, and the more people pay attention to him, the more space he can create for his teammates. Because there’s one thing I do know for sure about Thomas Müller: he really doesn’t care who scores the goals, as long as his team wins and he gets his hands on the trophy. And all of his teammates know that.
Müller is one of the most prolific goalscorers in the Bundesliga, and his record in the league yields one extraordinary statistic: Bayern have never lost a match in which he scored. He once went through a 999-minute goal drought that must have seriously perturbed the team. This record also illustrates a characteristic of his: he often scores the very most critical goals at the very most critical moments. His absolute aura of coolth on the pitch, under the most fraught conditions, with TV cameras catching every moment, is truly extraordinary.
Yet by his own admission, he’s not the fastest runner, the best dribbler, the most accurate shooter, the highest jumper, the strongest kicker. What he is the very best at, is being in the right place at the right time, and doing exactly the right thing to get the ball in the back of that net. And if it means he has to put it there himself, that gives him enormous pleasure as well. Ten World Cup goals in two tournaments already places him in the league of the greatest of the great. Yet this is what he had to say to a reporter who asked him, as reporters always do, how he feels to be awarded the Golden Boot as the best goalscorer in the 2010 tournament.
The only thing that mattered, Thomas told her in German, was winning the tournament. I’ve seen an interview with a German journalist where they have to switch to English, and Thomas’s English is much better than that of the journalist. He was sending a special message to all German fans here.
To be honest, I hate “The Greatest Ever” lists, they are almost always either an exercise in platitudes or a tedious display of esoterica. I’m no football expert, I have never written before on football, I have hardly followed international football for the last 25 years, mostly because I’ve never owned a TV set. But now, with Youtubes, I am catching up on some of what I’ve missed. And as the World Cup in Russia looms, a huge intuition is building in me that Thomas Müller may be the right man in the right place at the right time to create some truly spectacular chaos in 2018.
And this is where there is another aspect to Thomas Müller and the functioning of his superpower. He is also one of the game’s greatest natural comedians, a troll and prankster of note, who never forgets — I truly believe this — that the very bottom line is that he is an entertainer, that football is supposed to be fun, a game. He commented once that he might be so popular in China because the Chinese like to be entertained. He understands this dimension perfectly. And in a hideously fragmented world, where the single most watched event in global TV is the World Cup final, he is determined to keep it fun and clean and spectacular. While winning all the way. In this, as with his natural mandinga, he is very Brazilian in spirit. And I really believe he is fulfilling the true purpose of the sport; and in redefining the modern global game, he has now become, for me, the greatest player ever, taking football single-handedly into entirely new and very healthy and exciting realms.
For completeness, here are my numbers two and three. Of all other players, I would rate Zinedine Zidane as simply the greatest ever — so effortless and graceful that you hardly notice his skills, and also the perfect teammate, always facilitating his colleagues and making the exact right move at the exact right time. At the World Cup in 2006, he basically single-handed defeated one of the greatest Brazilian teams of all time. Even the Brazilians went to congratulate him after the match.
Thomas Müller himself admits that he can look clumsy and awkward and is not the most skilled of players. Zidane is everything that Müller isn’t. In any normal sense — especially if what happens on the pitch is the only thing — Zidane is head and shoulders the greater player.
Yet France relied far too heavily on him, and it showed in the end, when he decided to end his World Cup career with a spectacular head-butt. And again, if you are relying too heavily on individual talent, and not looking to integrate your team and work as a unit, you are ultimately doomed in top class football in this era.
My third place goes to Pelé, and I don’t care if this is platitudinous. This is purely on the record. Maradona: 8 WC goals in four tournaments and one title. Pelé: 12 goals in four tournaments and three titles. Game over.
Zizou is of Algerian descent, I count him as an African, although he was born in Marseilles. So my top three cover three continents, I like that.
I’m not arguing that Maradona wasn’t a true genius with stupendous skills, or that he didn’t use his teammates brilliantly from time to time; but his whole style was based on his incredible individual efforts and that simply does not cut it any more. For proof, please see the cases of Cristiano Ronaldo for Portugal, Messi for Argentina, and Neymar for Brazil. All of them came up across German teams with Thomas Müller, and all of them came croppers, Brazil spectacularly so, to the tune of seven goals to one in 2014, one of the most drastic defeats in the history of world football. And forget not that this happened right in Brazil itself.
Müller scored only one goal in this massacre, but it was the first and it triggered the whole collapse. The goal came off a corner, and you can see a Brazilian player on the goal line protesting after the ball goes into the net, as if he thinks it must be offside. You cannot be offside from a corner. But that is the feeling Thomas Müller gives many defenders: something wrong has happened here, surely this shouldn’t be allowed. Watch a string of Müller’s goals in succession, and you will see goalkeeper after goalkeeper completely flummoxed, often desperately diving after a ball that has been hammered exactly into the space he was defending until he decided to move. It’s so hard to move backwards once you’ve committed yourself, and no one can read these situations and react better than Thomas Müller.
In my household, very short shrift is given to “man kicks ball” as important news. International football has become a global circus of such spectacular dimensions that it can hardly be measured, and much of it is not a pretty sight. Nelson Mandela was the face of South Africa being granted the 2010 World Cup. Now the truly awesome scale of the corruption behind this has been at least partly revealed — with Fifa agreeing to allow South Africa to use some of its Fifa allocation for a massive known bribe.
Ultimately, though, the reason football is banned as a topic in my house is that it’s been wrecked as a sport by the prima donnas and the divers. Football must be the only sport where you can get red carded for bad acting. Now, you will find no footballer as camera-conscious as Thomas Müller. There’s a Youtube where the little kid standing in front of him at the opening ceremony has a webcam on their cap. The big screen on the stadium is showing the kid’s viewpoint, all very touching, until Thomas’s huge hand descends and blocks the whole scene.
There’s every evidence that Müller is completely unafraid to let his feelings be known on pitch. He’s herded Brazilians away from his goalkeeper when they tried to attack him, and had to be held back by his colleagues when he tried to confront the Brazilians. He knows the cameras are recording every angle.
So there is one serious case where some people say Thomas Müller overdid a shove in the face, with dire consequences for the shover, during a crucial match against Portugal in the 2014 World Cup. I’m going to go into this in detail, not least because I’m from Johannesburg, with a huge Portuguese population, and my World Cup watching in that city was generally done from Portuguese restaurants, with probably the most combative fans in the world. So I’ve always really hoped that Portugal would one day make good on the world stage, not least because it would lessen the probability of gunplay in the sports bar.
All of my Portuguese friends would reiterate the same truth and say the same prayer before each match: if only these Porras can finally keep their tempers, and not kick someone in the head this time, we might win. It’s just in the Portuguese temperament, it’s a fact. They did not become the first true global colonialists for nothing, there’s a very volatile and aggressive streak in their blood.
Of all international footballers, then, it’s no surprise that the one with the most savage reputation for blatant, vicious, and totally deliberate fouls is one Pepe, a longstanding Portugal defender. Apparently the sweetest soul off the pitch, even by his own admission he becomes a sociopathic killer when he loses it on the field. He has repeatedly kicked players on the ground and raked them with his boots. He is famous for stamping on Messi’s hand while he was lying on the ground. He has been banned from international competition more than any other player (I think) for sheer thuggery. And in 2014, he came head-to-head with Thomas Müller.
For all those vaunted camera angles at the World Cup, below shows a screenshot from the only record you can find of the incident for which Müller is said to have overreacted. Pepe clearly hits him across the face, it actually looks like he’s hitting his right eye, but Müller goes down, and starts feeling his left jaw (which Pepe definitely smacked) as if he’s got a loose tooth. Now, Pepe is famous for these little mandinga kicks and shoves, and Pepe alwaysclaims that the other guy is overreacting. My inclination, on a close look, is that Thomas Müller got a nasty little deliberate whack in the face delivered by a true and very calculating psycho, also quite aware of the camera angles. And Müller was in no way looking for any trouble after this smack, he was genuinely just sitting there, feeling his jaw and altogether minding his own business. If that’s overreacting and playacting, then Thomas Müller truly wins the award for the most minimal performance in a starring role.
Pepe then does what is agreed by every pundit to be the very stupidest thing he could have possibly done. Did I mention that after Zinedine Zidane’s truly epic cabeçada or headbutt (the basic capoeira move, incidentally), Fifa has ruled once and for all that All Head-Butting Is Out, and that any such kind of behaviour will immediately be given the red card, especially if committed right in front of the referee. This is what Pepe did next:
Here you can see Müller nursing his left jaw — as he goes down, it seems he got jabbed in the right eye, but he clearly got some kind of smack across the face. The fact that he changes from eye to jaw actually is proof to me that he’s not acting — your first reaction is to pull away if someone hits your eye, and then you find you’ve got a tooth loose. Just speculating: but I can tell you, at this moment, a dread silence will have gone over the Portuguese crowd, because they know exactly what this means. We’ve gone and lost it again. And Pepe’s disingenuous smile when he incredulously wonders why he’s being sent off, just adds to the sociopathy in this particular case
He went on to score a hat-trick in this game, one of the elite few to have done this at the World Cup finals. This was the tournament in which Cristiano Ronaldo was determined to prove that he was the greatest player ever. One thing for sure, Ronaldo was not play-acting his distress on Portugal’s departure from the tournament. Truly, you are watching the global game being turned inside out here, the gods with logo-laden feet of clay.
In researching this, I treated myself and looked at all the other legends I could think of, to see if I was missing anything or anyone. At the age of 10, we spent a year in England, this was 1967/68. I was lucky enough to see George Best at his prime on Match of the Day many times. You could easily argue that he was the greatest footballer ever, certainly one of the most charismatic, just with an Irish accident of birth that saw him never achieve the heights of international fame he might have elsewhere.
If I go into the sports bar and want to start a fight, and say: “So who is the greatest Portuguese player ever?”, I bet you one in ten wouldn’t even recognise the name these days. Eusebio, the Black Pearl. Who actually won the Golden Boot at the 1966 World Cup finals? With nine goals? Many rate him as one of the greatest players ever. But I invite you to watch a match I saw live on TV at the time, the 1968 Champions League final, Man U vs. Benfica. This actually shows Best vs. Eusebio at their respective primes. Achtungspoiler alert: the full-time score was 1–1. This offers a very direct comparison of post-modern and old-style sport. The skills levels are amazingly low to my eye. Both Eusebio and Best make atrocious passes, shots are wide and wild, play ragged. Only the goalkeeping seems up to hold up, there are some amazing saves.
But most of all, just watch the physicality of the match, the tension exploding into uproar at times on the pitch. And the commentator says: “Eusebio, always the man to calm things down.” Very significant words, for any Portuguese with their heads in their hands.
Now, Eusebio was from Mozambique, our neighbours here, we used to drive to LM (where he was born) for lunch. The Swazis are very closely related, every year the Mozambican border is opened for Swazis to return to their ancestral stamping grounds. So I feel entitled to claim him as one of our own.
If you want to see a real little thug in action, just watch Nobby Stiles, a crowd hero. I saw a play once, set in the Amazonian jungle, where the only European words the Indians know are: “Nobby Stie! Nobby Stie”. Just see what he gets away with in this game, blatantly hacking down Eusebio for one thing.
Nobby, I remember vividly, had his own unique penalty style, he should have patented it, the Nobby Stiles Style. The goalkeeper knew in advance exactly what he would do: he would hit the pole and put the ball in the net. The only question was whether he was going to hit the left or the right pole.
Reliving this historic clash, I really feel confident in saying that things have changed. The game has reached another whole level, and the one thing we can learn from these old matches is how to handle the emotions.
Now, this was at a time when the Portuguese regarded their black subjects in the colonies as full Portuguese citizens (very useful in increasing your player pool) while basically designating them as “savages”. There was a particular class called assimilados, who had been taught how to eat with a knife and fork, and who were admitted to polite Portuguese society.
So I well remember my father saying of Eusebio, as we watched this match: “And you can see, he’s the greatest gentleman on the pitch.”
Every night, before the news on Radio Swaziland, they play a resounding rhythm from our traditional instrument, the makwheyane or musical bow. In Brazil, it’s called the berimbau, and it’s the instrument that always leads the action. “The berimbau is your first teacher” is one capoeira saying. Slaves from Mozambique took the instrument with them — it’s actually a women’s instrument here, the calabash exactly fits the breast, for one thing. There may be something to those legends of Amazon women warriors with bows at their breast. But under the pressures of slavery, living in cramped quarters, the men seem to have picked up the instrument, and capoeira was born.
So if you want to see the true origins of samba football at play — because samba de roda is straight from capoeira — then watch Eusebio, the best shot Portugal ever had at winning the World Cup. And, interestingly enough, my all-time iconic gentleman.
There was a player they called “the Russian Pelé”, Eduard Streltsov, who ran foul of the Communist authorities with his womanising and wild behaviour, his biggest sin being to embarrass the daughter of a top Party official. He ended up spending six years in the Gulags. He was a true precursor to George Best, a maverick who invented the back kick, called the “Streltsov pass” in Russia. He wore his hair in a Teddy Boy style and the Soviets were terrified he was going to defect and join a Western club.
I cannot find a single video that even begins to show what kind of skills Streltsov had. But to my astonishment, I discovered this week that I actually watched him play, live, for the Soviet Union, in red, in a friendly against England at Wembley Stadium in December 1967. Remember, this is the entire famous World-Cup winning team of one year earlier, with Geoff Hurst, Bobby Charlton, Alan Ball, Gordon Banks, Alan Mullery, Martin Peters, you name them. The ground was covered with snow, it was the height of the Cold War, we were ex-Communist exiles in London with not a few sympathies for the Reds, despite Joes Stalin and Slovo. And it was one of the most thrilling international friendlies for years, all the newspapers agreed the next day.
But the star was not Streltsov, indeed, none of us had ever heard of him. That night, Igor Chislenko scored two astonishing long-distance goals in the space of two minutes, through the snow and slush, to force a 2–2 draw with the World Cup champions. And everyone, even the English, agreed it was a thoroughly fair result.
So Igor Chislenko was one of my family’s early football heroes, and we wondered what he would achieve next. You will not find this recorded on the Internet, I really looked, but there is no mention anywhere of what happened to him. I remember my father reacting in shock to a newspaper story, just a few months later. Chislenko had suffered terrible injuries in a car accident. The issue was not whether he would play again, it was whether he would ever walk again.
That taught me a lesson very early. Life is terribly fragile, and the greatest gods of sport can be cut down at any minute. This is also why I do not write lightly and make predictions for Thomas Müller. Of all footballers I’ve seen, he has a special knack for generally managing to keep himself from being kicked or hurt, although he has had time out with injuries. This is another very special facet of the Raumdeuter. In capoeira, it’s called corpo fechado, closed body, you create a space around yourself that no one can penetrate, even bullets cannot touch you. I believe Thomas Müller has this element: he constantly operates in the gaps, in the interstitial spaces so beloved of science fiction writers. That “inner-stitial” space. And I hope and pray that he keeps safe to entertain us for many years to come.
There was another world’s-best-ever, no question this time, who also had the uncanny facility to work empty space. This was the legendary Don Bradman, the greatest cricket batsman in history. He always said: I don’t look where the fielders are. I look where the gaps are.
One of Thomas Müller’s teammates describes in an interview how Thomas always keeps his nerve, saying “he’s as cool as a dog’s nose in front of goal”. Oh, I have two dogs, Müller replies, I know that, it’s a great feeling. The voiceover then describes him as Bayern’s “dog whisperer”, hence the subtitle of this story. Let me now show you Thomas Müller doing some classic goalkeeper whispering, while trolling the media at their own game and once again dishing them back their own nonsense. After a very rare penalty miss, a journalist starts quizzing him about his style, saying that 90% of the time if the keeper doesn’t move, he shoots to the left. “Well, if you’re saying that, then I must have a side, I have to”,
Phew, he concludes, so I don’t have to worry about it. Now, this little exchange is a straight exercise in the psyching-out of goalkeepers, who are always trying to guess which side the penalty kick is going to go. Thomas Müller has a true talent for looking one way and kicking another; this is what I mean by gestalt, he is seeing a higher picture. He has an absolute set penalty routine, never any tricks, and if he sees the goalkeeper moving, it’s all over. So when some expert quotes statistics to him, to tell him what he does, Thomas turns it around very smartly. This is media savvy in every sense.
Thomas Müller is savvy in other ways too. He got married at 20 to his sweetheart Lisa, figuring that he was now making enough money, without having to worry about studying or all the other things his peers were having to deal with, for them to settle down and start a life. You can find videos of him cooking a very respectable pasta with Lisa.
So let me tell you one other certain thing about Thomas Müller: he is intensely ambitious, and he knows that he can break every record for silverware if he sticks to his guns. He really, really wants this. And having this stable, completely scandal-free existence from such an early age, shows an incredible maturity in my eyes. Just compare this with Wayne Rooney’s wild red-light excesses when he first hit the big time. This is another reason why I’m sticking my neck out and punting Thomas Müller. He’s in it for the long haul, he’s very astute in that sense, and he will not jeopardize any of that future with stupid behaviour.
Can you imagine what kind of a manager Thomas Müller might make in the future? He is 28 years old now, there is no reason why his football career should not last another half-century. Who can guess how tactics and strategy might evolve under his guidance. As it is, he’s benefited from truly inspired leadership from German manager Joachim Löw, who is on record as saying:
What strategies are being plotted to contain Thomas Müller and the rest of the German squad? I took a look at recent Russian performances, and one player caught my eye, a certain Fyodor Smolov, who scored some spectacular goals in the qualifying rounds. Listen to this description of him:
It would be wrong to characterise the 26-year-old as a pure finisher, however. On the contrary, he is quite involved in attacking moves for Krasnodar, his experience playing around a front man clearly paying off.
He will appear anywhere across the front line for his team even when deployed as the classic №9 in the middle, allowing team-mates to make runs into the most advanced spaces on the pitch. Because he is so dangerous from almost anywhere, defenders tend to follow him around, which can cause confusion in the centre.
As it happens, there is a Russian martial art called Systema which works very centrally on the idea of a creating a vacuum where you simply aren’t, if someone tries to attack you. There are some extremely spooky videos around of “no contact” Systema. You can watch a documentary video here featuring one Alexander Leonidovich Lavrov, definitely a man you do not want to meet in a dark alley. It’s the one video I’m embedding here, specifically because it includes a very interesting demonstration of divining rods, just so that we know what we are talking about (one trick is to tell the difference between a loaded and unloaded gun from a distance.
At around 22 minutes in, you’ll see some things happening in a dark corridor that you might prefer to think is trickery, but I can assure you, Spetsnaz, the Russian special forces, do not fool around, and neither does the Russian football team. Incidentally, I would not advise any football hooligans from any country to try creating trouble at World Cup 2018 unless they feel like making someone’s day, I suspect they will be picked out and clinically removed long before they cause their first bit of bother. This World Cup will surely be conducted amidst the greatest security operation ever seen for this event.
I just want to make one reflection here on trying to compare the greats of past and present. The changes in video technology and media coverage generally really make it difficult to render any proper comparisons. But I checked out one other Russian legend, and found that in this instance, the old black-and-white films served only to enhance the sheer physical bravery of the incredible goalkeeper Lev Yashin. Time and again, you see a grainy picture of men chasing up and down, and then — like a monster in a B-grade movie, with the wires and pulleys showing — this vast, Yeti-like creature hurtles into the frame and completely envelops and swallows up the ball. Here’s just one example:
Goalkeepers occasionally get into the spotlight, but in the “greatest ever player” stakes they always get left out. Yashin ’s courage will live forever in these fleeting clips, as will his amazing sportsmanship, shaking hands with each player with whom he had a bone-crunching collision.
As I wind down, a host of images flickers before my eyes, mostly of Thomas Müller playing the fool. Doing apparent ballet steps around the ball during practice. Dancing the Bavarian samba:
The Bayern squad is videoed coming out for a practice on a freezing, snowy morning; all the players are dressed in normal red kit, except for Thomas, who emerges wearing red underpants. Thomas mercilessly tickling a teammate during a photoshoot to get him to smile. Thomas helping out the goalkeeper during a deadball practice session by roaring onto the pitch with a golf cart and blocking off half the goalmouth.
The troll also regularly gets trolled: there’s a Youtube where Kermit the Frog lets loose a string of increasingly despairing and very authentic-sounding expletives when he realises he sounds just like Thomas Müller.
I will never forget a big headline in the UK press after Germany thrashed England in the 2010 World Cup, with Müller scoring two stunning goals: “MULLERED”. This year, the subeditor may just have to add: “ — AGAIN”.
I’m going to end with one description of Thomas Müller after the World Cup victory in 2014, as the entire team was celebrating wildly. For once, Thomas was not in the middle with a megaphone, leading the cheering.
Behind the dancing players, one figure in white could be seen. Müller was overwhelmed with emotion, perhaps even exhaustion. He briefly held back from the partying pack of his teammates. He looked at the Maracana pitch, knowing he had run himself into the ground for his country.
Truly, I do believe, Thomas Müller is in a class all of his own. Good luck, Raumdeuter. That’s what you represent for any team.
I’m very sorry to make a long piece longer, but after some further research, I finally pinned down the true origin of the term Raumdeuter. This was, of course, — can’t think how I missed it. This expression is actually an extremely clever play by Thomas Müller (expect no less…) on the German term Traumdeuter, which is generally rendered as “dream interpreter”. But even a superficial search reveals many instances where it is given as dream “diviner”, a much better word than “interpreter”, which is quite weak and open to ambiguity — Thomas Müller does do simultaneous translations in press interviews, but not while scoring goals. I was thinking of rewriting the above piece to reflect this new information, but decided to leave it as it was, just to keep the process of discovery clear. As far as I’m concerned, this is the definitive English translation of what Thomas Müller put across so expressively in German
When I am stopped by the traffic police in Swaziland, after my driver’s licence is examined, I am always asked one of two stern questions: (1) How much do you want for this Tazz? To which I reply, sorry, my friend, I will never sell this car, ever ever ever. Or, even more sternly: (2) Are you related to Thomas Müller? To which I indignantly reply, of course, he’s my cousin. (This is Swaziland, we have very extended families here, this is a humorous answer.)
My branch of the Muller tribe dropped the umlaut around the time of the First World War, but the family historian, my aunt Zouna, always used to insert the two little dots in a different colour ink when she posted me a letter. I even tried using it as a byline once, to distinguish myself from certain other members of the family; but this immediately got rendered as “Mueller” in an American version and I decided it wasn’t worth it. But yes, I do suspect that Thomas Müller is a distant relative, enough to swear this regularly to the police.
The Müller brand in football, of course, was long established by the legendary Gerd Müller (my uncle), whose record of 14 World Cup goals stood for an astonishing 36 years. There’s not a small element of Gerd’s style in Thomas’s uncanny reactions in the box. Just one fragment of a window opens, and before anyone else can react, they pounce and smash the ball in. Or backheel it as if they’re fooling around at a Sunday picnic.
This is not to mention the Brazilian Müller, who took his nom de guerra from Gerd (in capoeira your nickname is known as your apelido, you’re always given one, gangsters never go by their real names.) There’s very little information on this Müller, but I think he played in three World Cups and had a real talent for getting his name on the TV screen during celebrations. You can see an absolutely scorching post-rattler he makes against France in 1986 here — tell me if you don’t recognise the style.
This is not to say that all Mullers are related. There are two quite distinct branches of the family in South Africa: the boring ones; and then us, a really motley crew of saints and sinners. My side includes, as a definitive connection, Hildegard Muller, who was one of the world’s longest-serving foreign ministers. Oddly, you can find hardly a single reference to him anywhere on the Internet, but he was a highly respected diplomat even at the United Nations, which eventually threw apartheid South Africa out.
I’ll refrain from naming some of the scoundrels, but I found a very interesting reference recently to a Boer War general called Muller from our side of the family.
The book of the famous Voëlvry tour of anti-establishment Afrikaans musicians in the late 1980s, which undertook a reverse Great Trek across the country, causing chaos wherever they went (I caught the very last concert), quotes an ancient Sunday Express article as saying of General Chris Muller:
During the guerrilla warfare in the Transvaaal, General Muller received a “clairvoyant leg”. If the enemy advanced or moved up in his direction, his leg would begin and keep on paining just above the knee. When they fought and his calf began paining, the enemy either fled or retreated. Of such infinite help was this clairvoyant leg, that the enemy never surprised him.
It’s not even too hard to see how this clairvoyant leg functioned — his limb was subconsciously intuiting the overall situation, and cuing itself either to walk forward or backward.
Perhaps the Raumdeuter Thomas Müller has inherited our family’s clairvoyant leg in a more sophisticated form? Is this the true origin of the mandinga kick?
I am a scientific editor, not a sports writer. But as a non-German speaker, I became intrigued with this term Raumdeuter, and did what I always do when trying to pin down a foreign term as an editor, I trawled all the translation sites (at least I wasn’t pasting Korean text in this time). And I eventually found a German saying that was translated as: “He’s a soothsayer, astrologer, and diviner of mysteries”, using the word deuter to mean “diviner”. And I thought to myself: this is it. Someone has to get this right, and if his name is also Muller, it’s just a happy coincidence. An opportunity presented itself and I pounced. I have tried to make this account as accessible as possible to non-football fans. If this, my first story on Medium.com, has in any way entertained you, I sincerely thank you for your kind attention.