End of discussion

By: Scott | October 10th, 2009

Yes, Germany’s keeper is amazing. His name is Rene Adler. He plays for Leverkusen.

The city I’m living in is a mosaic of nationalities, ex-pats and those whose hearts reside in the land of their forebears. On a day like today, when key qualifying matches were being played around the world, it’s easy to find a makeshift “headquarters” where one can join the revelry or despair of supporters of virtually any nation. My mid-day was spent in a Bavarian restaurant, where I watched Germany seal their passage to next summer’s World Cup. By the time I was back home, the noise, noise, noise of honking horns had already started from the over-celebratory Italy supporters, mercifully petering out before it became farcical. Horns for a draw against Ireland? C’mon, guys. Show some restraint.

As early evening rolled around, I was back out to meet a friend at a pub frequented by the city’s South Americans. The main draw was Chile, but other screens were showing the Argentina/Peru tie, Maradona looking very much like Manuel Noriega’s grieving aunt, not an Argentine in the bar, one sagging lump of a man peppering the Chile chants with his own high-pitched Pe-Pe! Ru-Ru! Peru!

“Guess how old I am!” he urged me during half-time.

“Seventy-five,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “I am.”

The man looked like apple sauce come to life. I thought I was being polite when I guessed 75. I kind of expected he’d come back with “I’ll be 300 next week!”

The colours were mostly Chilean. A handful of Colombian kits. A pair of Uruguayans on mobiles trying to get the updates the screens weren’t providing. And me, still in the DFB’s latest stylings.

adler_faust_345 “Germany!” People said to me. “Your keeper is amazing. What’s his name? Who does he play for?” And I got to feel proud on two fronts, national and club- although I soon modified “He plays for Leverkusen- same as Vidal,” to the more compact “He plays for Leverkusen,” after Arturo sloppily opened the scoring for the wrong team.

It was a lucky match, today, for the Mannschaft. We didn’t dominate by a long shot, but when the shots came at us, Rene Adler was about as good a man as anyone could want to have standing between the attackers and the back of the net.

“Pressure there, pressure here: These are exactly the sort of matches you work hard for and why you put in hours of training each day,” Adler had said before the trip to Moscow. But nary a hint of concern crossed his face through 90 minutes. He looked calm, ready and confident, even when he was left to go one-on-one with Russia’s best- something that might have happened more often if it weren’t for Simon Rolfes, who kept the much-lauded Andrei Arshavin in check for the better part of the match. Pressure came, but it was artfully dispatched and there’s nothing I can tell you about that here that you probably haven’t already read- or seen- for yourself.

In just a year’s time, since he first stepped between the posts for the Mannschaft, Rene has more than proven his capabilities and developed into a solid, reliable ‘keeper. It has become brilliantly clear that he is precisely the sort of ‘keeper Ollie Kahn recently said Germany didn’t have: Weltklasse. So what do you think? Can we give the man more than the sick-leave confidence he’s been afforded until now and hand him his number one on a long-term basis? Show of hands? Excell- oh…. sorry. There in the back- Wiese…. You had something to add? No? Excellent! Looking forward to South Africa.