At the start of ‘
King Otto‘, the German football legend Otto Rehhagel makes himself comfortable on his throne-like chair and tells his off-camera interlocutor in German: “I don’t understand what’s going on here.”
This confusion comes off as the motif of how history played out… when in 2004, against astronomical odds, Greece won the Euro Cup!
But let’s rewind to three years before that, back to 2001. At that time, new president of the Hellenic football Association, Vasilis Gagatsis, hired decorated coach Otto Rehhagel to whip the national team into shape.
The “travelling circus”, Gagatsis said referring to the team, had never won a game, or a single point in an international competition. They approached football with the same attitude Greeks generally approach life, with a focus on good times.
How German Otto Rehhagel led Greece to Euro 2004 glory
The sporting field may be a substitute for the battlefields of the past but it’s one of the few arenas where nationalistic fervour can find a positive outlet.
Otto Rehhagel, the German coach who turned the Greek national football team into champions.
John McDonald
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We live in a deeply divided world, but when was it any different? One of Europe’s most ingrained divisions has been between the so-called Teutonic spirit and the Mediterranean spirit. It was a contrast that exercised the mind and the pen of artist Emil Nolde, who saw the Germans as the embodiment of all things good, brave and true, and the southerners as a group of shiftless, lazy ne’er-do-wells.
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