It started with a sicknote and ended in arguably the biggest fairytale story ever penned by a Scottish player.
Paul Lambert, a good solid professional plying his trade at Motherwell, taking a punt on a trial in Germany that was to end with him marking Zinedine Zidane out of the Champions League final a year later. The midfielder would go on to captain Scotland and Celtic but Lambert admits that a decision to pull the wool over Fir Park boss Alex McLeish’s eyes in the summer of 1996 changed everything.
Speaking on the Off The Record podcast, Lambert said: “Motherwell were going to Northampton, pre-season, and Rab McKinnon had gone to Twente Enschede. I kept in touch with him and asked how the move had come around and he told me a Dutch agent, Ton van Dalen, had made it happen and offered to put me in touch with him.
“Ton phoned me just as Motherwell were going to Northampton, so I was thinking, ‘how am I going to get out of that trip?’ I shouldn’t have done it, but I did it - I pulled a sickie.
“Ton told me to jump on a plane and he’d meet me in Enschede. He was at the airport waiting and we jumped in his car but I still didn’t know where I was going.
“He told me, ‘There’s two teams. One is PSV Eindhoven and the other is Borussia Dortmund’. I just thought, ‘Jesus’...if he’d said Azerbaijan I’d have gone because I’d killed myself with Motherwell. I’d taken a sickie, so I wouldn’t be playing there again.
“We went to Eindhoven, where Dick Adovcaat was the coach and was very welcoming. They had a right good side.
“He played me on the right wing but I was never quick and I couldn’t do one v one situations where I’d get to the byeline and whip a ball in. Funnily enough, I scored two goals in two games but I was never a winger.
“He came up to my room at my hotel and said: ‘I know you’re going to Borussia Dortmund. Good luck to you.’ We jumped in the car to Dortmund, met Mr Meier and he and Ton had done my contract in half an hour.
“I didn’t have a clue what they were saying as they were speaking German but Ton then told me I had four trial games. If you do well, the contract is there for you. If you don’t, you go back with your tail between your legs.
“The contract could have been three Irn Brus and a Mojo and I’d have signed it. I was determined to sign it. I thought that even if I didn’t play there (regularly), I wanted to learn something different.”
“I played the four games, playing central midfield and did well. Then the Thursday before the start of the season, Ottmar said to me: ‘we’ve just signed Paolo Sousa from Juventus, so if Paolo’s fit, you’re on the bench against Leverkusen and Paolo plays.’
“Paolo’s knee wasn’t ready, so I played against Leverkusen - and away it goes. In my first home game, against Fortuna Dusseldorf the following midweek, Ottmar made three substitutions and I wasn’t one of them.
“That match went really well for me but I remember looking across and seeing Karla (Karl-Heinz Riedle) and Paolo coming on and thinking: ‘I need to kill people to stay in this team. Look what’s coming off the bench.’
“That was my mindset. I knew if I went out this team, I wasn’t getting back in. That dressing room had won World Cups, Serie A titles, Champions League titles and I thought then that I was going to have to perform at the highest level to stay in this side, because it’s too good. From that game on, it escalated into something that was a ridiculous story, really.”
Ridiculous? Maybe. Glorious? Certainly. And while the Champions League medal represented the pinnacle of his career, Lambert believes that immersing himself in the Germans’ winning culture made him the player he was to become.
He explained: “The fear of losing was really high with me all the time. I was at a club that had to win and I had to earn their respect. They knew what they were going to get from me and if I was bang at it, I’d be hard to play against.
“Training was like we played. Jurgen Kohler and Matthais Sammer were incredible defenders. I’d never seen anything like that. If we won 1-0, it was ‘well done, let’s move to the next one’. If we lose, analyse it for a day and let it go.
“That was their mentality. That club made me realise that I could play in any company and no matter who I was up against, I could handle any opponent.
“One of the biggest compliments I ever had was from Andi Moller, who was probably the greatest player I played with. He said to me one that he wouldn’t have been the same player if I hadn’t had his back. That’s when I thought I must be doing something right!”
Any opponent included Zidane, arguably the best player in the world at the time and who was expected to lead Juventus to victory in that 1997 Champions League final in Munich.
That Dortmund boss Ottmar Hitzfeld trusted Lambert to shackle the French icon said everything about the impact he made in Germany. “Zidane had this brilliant way of drifting off your shoulder. If the ball was on the right hand side, he’d drift away from you. I told myself that I couldn’t get attracted to the ball because Juventus are so good they’d find him and when he gets a chance he normally scores.
“He was really two-footed. He could sway one way then go the other on either side. I had to bang on it.
“They had a great team. Marcello Lippi was their manager and Alessandro Del Piero was a sub because they had (Alen) Boksic and (Christian) Vieri up front with Zidane floating behind.
“So, with the team they had we knew we had to be bang on it. But I had a really strong feeling we would win. Whoever was going to beat Borussia Dortmund at that time had to be an incredible team.
“With the firepower we had at the time - Chapi (Stephane Chapuisat), Karla or Andi - there was always goals in the team. I wasn’t nervous. I had what they had (confidence). I knew how big the game was I was ready.
“The way the bus parked in Munich it was near the corner flag, so you walked onto the track and by the time we got there, the stadium was full. Half black and white, half yellow and black. The flags were going and it was like: ‘wow’. That’s when it became proper.
“I’ll never forget walking past the trophy as it stood on the plinth, thinking: ‘God, if there’s one trophy you need to give me, it’s this f***ing one here.’
They won 3-1. Lambert provided the assist for the opener. The sicknote had become the fairytale.
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