WHAT HAPPENED TO THE GOLDEN GENERATION?
Rudi Voller didn’t see it coming. Germany led England by six points in qualification for the 2002 World Cup – it looked all over. During the month reserved for the play-offs, Germany’s head coach had already arranged friendlies against South Korea and Thailand in preparation for the tournament itself. “I expect us to go through directly,” he stated, confidently. “If England go to the play-offs, I will keep my fingers crossed for them.”
Germany were about to host Sven-Goran Eriksson’s side at Munich’s Olympiastadion, and Voller’s confidence was natural: Die Mannschaft had beaten England 1-0 in that rain-sodden last game at Wembley. In their most recent outing, they had thrashed Hungary 5-2 – leaving the German press to laud ‘the Sebastian Generation’: a crop of emerging stars led by the highly rated Sebastian Deisler.
The Three Lions, by contrast, had just been outclassed in a 2-0 home friendly defeat to the Netherlands – a team that wouldn’t even reach the forthcoming World Cup. In Germany’s entire history, they had lost only one World Cup qualifier – a 1-0 reverse to Portugal in 1985 with their spot in Mexico already secured. “England are not dreaming of scoring lots of goals,” suggested Bayer Leverkusen centre-back Jens Nowotny. “They will be very defence-orientated.”
How wrong he was. When Germany went 1-0 up after six minutes through Carsten Jancker, they seemed set to mathematically confirm their qualification that evening. But then they were hit by arguably the most astonishing Three Lions display ever. On September 1, 2001, the Golden Generation was born.
David Beckham, Michael Owen, Rio Ferdinand, Gary Neville, Steven Gerrard, Ashley Cole, Paul Scholes. All came together to tear Germany apart – Owen with a hat-trick, before Emile Heskey slid home to seal a sensational victory.
“It’s hard to put into words how I felt when I scored the fifthnow. “It was so crazy. That’s the game that people still stop me in the street about. Germany had humiliated us in our garden, but we’d taken it back to them. We’d gone into theirs and won 5-1. We had some wonderful players, and everything just clicked.
