One of the most enduring football images of the last decade is of a balmy night in Hampden Park, Glasgow. In it, French maestro Zinedine Zidane is seen poised on the brink of hammering home an unstoppable volley to decide the Champions League final in 2002.
Zidane's gaze is steady, his balance phenomenal. You see the photo and you know with absolute certainty where the dropping ball will finish its journey.
But this is not about Zidane; instead it is about the other man captured in that iconic picture.
Just two steps behind the Frenchman, with his mouth stretched in an elongated ‘O' of surprise that suggests he already knows he is a second too late, is Michael Ballack. The German is second to the ball, and his covering run is not enough to stop Zidane's pirouetting left foot. Thus began the cyclical hell that is perhaps the cruelest football career to date.
Because, for Michael Ballack, life has always been about finishing second.
Which obviously begs the question, why settle for second best? Why choose to write about the nearly man who has never won any of football's biggest prizes? Why choose Michael Ballack when you have Zinedine Zidane?
To paraphrase Bill Shankly, football is only partly about the game. In actuality, it is about so much more.
My fancy for Ballack stems not solely from his performance on the pitch, but perhaps because Ballack has been forever misunderstood, not just in Bangladesh but all over the world. And hey, everyone loves conflict. He is loved and loathed in equal measure; some call him superb while others think he is vastly overrated. He is often the victim of false praise and misdirected criticism, and it may well not be an exaggeration to say that no modern footballer divides opinion as much as Ballack.
I wonder that perhaps, for me, the charm of Ballack lies in this uniquely divisive nature of his perception. But hey, who really knows?
What matters is that, like anyone else, I like to idealize (and rationalize) my intentions. Hence, I would like to believe that Ballack is my favourite player, not because of some random chemical reactions in my brain, but because he knows the one thing that is more important than possessing all the football talent in the world –- sacrifice.
He has consistently sacrificed personal honours for his wavering belief that the team is bigger than the individual. That the team is the real star.
So let's rewind to 2002 and South Korea when a young Ballack put the fabled tears of Paul Gascoigne and Italia 90 into perspective. Here's how it worked –- an English footballer and a German footballer receive yellow cards in separate World Cup semi-finals and realisze that they will be suspended for the respective finals, should their side reach them. The English player wept in self-pity and is still being encouraged to talk about those tears on television; the German player scored the goal that took his quite shoddy team into the final and is yet viewed with circumspection by his countrymen.
You see, conflict.
