Maier, Vogts, Schwarzenbeck, Beckenbauer, Breitner, Bonhof, Hoeness, Overath, Grabowski, Müller, Hölzenbein
Why is it that I can remember the West German team in the 1974 World Cup Final – even though I only watched the last fifteen or twenty minutes because we were all too nervous and so instead played the final outside on the front field and in this case Scotland had got to the final to play Holland so there would be no moral losers in this parallel universe.
And when we scored a goal we would do an impression of the player who scored, so Denis Law would stop to chat about his time in Italy with Turin and hanging out with Enzo Bearzot, or Peter Lorimer would mutter some garbled Yorskhire/Scottish “you knows” when faced with the invisible microphone – yet I can’t remember what happened last year, or last week? Or even yesterday?
For instance, what were the names of those people I met at that party? Actually, it wasn’t a party (see, I can’t even remember that properly) it was in the school playground and they were parents of my one of my son’s friends. I instinctively said “party” because this book is probably going to end up in the memoir section of the bookshop and I’m thinking that I might need to make my life more interesting than it actually is.