Gavin Allen

When Paul Lambert left Motherwell in the summer of 1996, he had no club, no agent and very little money. The Bosman ruling meant he could leave for nothing, but the offers he expected never came. Motherwell wanted him to stay, yet Lambert had decided he needed to try something different. “I was actually tapping my mum and dad for a few quid.” His father was a roof tiler, his mother a housewife, and their 26-year-old son who had been a professional footballer for more than a decade was asking them for money. Through former Motherwell teammate Rob McKinnon, Lambert was put in touch with a Dutch agent called Ton van Dalen. Lambert waited beside the house phone, increasingly convinced nothing was going to happen, while Motherwell prepared to start pre-season. Then Van Dalen finally rang. Lambert was told to fly to Amsterdam, where he would be met by a man he had never seen before holding a card with his name on it. The first trial was PSV Eindhoven. Dick Advocaat played him on the wing, Lambert scored twice, but after five days it was obvious he was not what PSV wanted. That same day Van Dalen took him to Borussia Dortmund. When Lambert arrived, there was another small problem he needed to explain to general manager Michael Meier. “Motherwell don’t know I’m here.” “They don’t have a clue where I am.” “The other thing is I’ve run out of money as well.” Meier gave him 200 Deutschmarks. “If you sign that contract for the trial, you give it back to us.” “If you don’t, you keep it.” That morning Lambert had been rejected by PSV. That afternoon he was wearing a Borussia Dortmund tracksuit and climbing onto a team bus containing Jürgen Kohler, Andreas Möller and Matthias Sammer, who would win the Ballon d’Or that year. “What the hell, look at these players.” Lambert got his contract. An injury to £7million signing Paulo Sousa helped him into the team at the beginning of the season, but once he got there he refused to give the place back. By the end of the season, he was starting the Champions League final. Dortmund faced holders Juventus in Munich, with Zinedine Zidane, Didier Deschamps, Alessandro Del Piero and Alen Bokšić on the other side. Lambert was given Zidane. He helped keep him quiet, then crossed for Riedle to score Dortmund’s opening goal as they won 3-1 and became European champions. Less than a year after borrowing money from his parents and sneaking away from Motherwell for trials nobody at the club knew about, Lambert had won the Champions League. Juventus wanted him afterwards. Franz Beckenbauer asked whether he would consider Bayern Munich. Lambert said no. “I had everything at Dortmund.” Before the family had moved to Germany, Lambert’s young son Christopher had suffered a febrile convulsion at home in Glasgow. He had a temperature, so Lambert and his wife brought him into their bed. Lambert noticed one of his arms had gone limp. When he picked him up, his head flopped as well. “I was shaking him, but there was nothing there.” His wife ran into the toilet and was sick while Lambert called an ambulance. Christopher recovered, but doctors warned them the convulsions could continue for another five or six years. For a while after the family moved to Germany, they stopped. Then, after Lambert had won the Champions League, they started again. Dortmund knew Celtic were interested and offered to do whatever they could to help the family remain in Germany. Every time Christopher became ill, Lambert and his wife were hundreds of miles away from their families and the hospitals they knew in Glasgow. Eventually they looked at each other and reached the same conclusion. “This is too difficult.” “Let’s go home.” Celtic had already tried several times to sign him. This time he said yes. Before leaving, Lambert played one final game for Dortmund, against Parma in the Champions League in November 1997. Banners appeared around the stadium. “Paul, don’t go.” “Thank you, Paul.” Then the supporters began singing: “Paul Lambert, You’ll Never Walk Alone.” After the game Dortmund asked him to do a lap of honour. Lambert walked around the ground and eventually stood in front of the Yellow Wall. “It got too emotional for me.” Lambert ran down the tunnel. Hundreds were still waiting when he finally reached his car. Close to midnight, Lambert went inside to complete the paperwork for his transfer. Lambert joined Celtic and for the first couple of months could barely play. His head was still in Dortmund and he genuinely wondered whether he had made the biggest mistake of his life. “Leaving was the hardest thing I ever did in football.” “Did it break my heart? One hundred per cent.” “But I look at my son now and think, ‘No, I did the right thing’.” “He was the most important thing to me.” Within months, Lambert helped Celtic win the Scottish title and stop Rangers reaching ten championships in a row. Years later, he could look back at how quickly everything had happened. “My football career is mad, isn’t it?” “It is real fairytale stuff.” #football #celtic