2015 WWC: Turning Point With Nadine Angerer

Fan girl alert! Fan girl alert! When I think of top female footballers, Angerer is one of the first names to pop into my head. Sure, she’s had her issues with consistency at the club level. But like with Buffon, she is the stalwart player when it comes to the German WNT. She’s been the calm, cool rock at the centre of a…calm, cool rock-bed of a team. You get what I mean.

Angerer announced her retirement back in May, planning to wind up her 20+year playing career in the fall with the Portland Thorns. Rather than being sad we’ll no longer see her play professionally, let’s just be grateful she played at all.

From FIFA Weekly:

There have been lots of special moments in my career. Like when I was named 2013 FIFA World Player of the Year. Or the European Championship final in the same year, when I saved two penalties as we won 1-0. Or at the 2007 FIFA Women’s World Cup™ in China, when we became world champions without conceding a goal.

It actually has more to do with luck that I ended up between the posts. I’d previously been a striker – and I was even top scorer once – but a day came when I filled in as goalkeeper because we had some injuries in the team. Even though I preferred scoring goals to saving them, that one-off became a more regular thing, and at some point I never came out of goal again. But all that’s just a footnote compared to the moment – a simple, almost existential choice – that had the most decisive influence my career.

I was 11 years old and I had a decision to make that would basically determine what path I took. Looking back, there’s a bit of Russian roulette to the situation, but instead of a revolver, I had two slips of folded paper.

I was good at a lot of sports when I was a kid. I played football but I was also in a handball club, and, like my mother, was a good triathlete as well. Football and handball were my main sports, and in both of them I’d made it into the regional Bavarian squad – now I had to decide which one to pursue to get to the next level. I deliberated on it for weeks and weighed up the pros and cons of both, but I still couldn’t choose. Then one day I just decided to leave it up to chance. I took two sheets of paper, wrote ‘handball’ on one and ‘football’ on the other, carefully folded them both very small and went with my mother out onto the balcony of our apartment. I took the two bits of paper in my hand, gave them a good shake, closed my eyes and dropped them on the table – and then picked one of them. Fate decided that I’d play football.

I wasn’t really emotional when I unfolded the paper and saw ‘football’, since I liked both sports. With hindsight you can obviously say I made the right decision, but you can’t really judge it against anything, since I don’t know what the alternative would have been like.

Perhaps I’d also have been a decent handball player – who knows. At the end of the day it’s pointless asking, ‘What if?’ I’m extremely satisfied with how my football career has turned out – it couldn’t have gone any better. I’m into my 20th year as a national team player and I still have a lot of ambitions. Like a third World Cup win in Canada this summer.

As an added bonus, I came across this music video by Voxx Club for the German WNT’s WWC theme song. I wonder if starring in the video is another turning point for Angerer? She’s got the fashion down, that’s for sure.

– hopechaser