Kahn: A festival of football

Posted Monday, April 19, 2010 by FIFA.com

Oliver Kahn requires few words by way of introduction. The German footballing legend is a well-known and popular figure around the world. In the course of an illustrious goalkeeping career, the man nicknamed Titan achieved almost all there is to achieve. His honours collection includes medals as a FIFA World Cup™ runner-up, European champion, German champion, German cup winner, UEFA Champions League winner and Toyota Intercontinental Cup winner, to name but the most prestigious.

Kahn also received a welter of individual honours, including Best Player and Goalkeeper at the 2002 FIFA World Cup, World Goalkeeper of the Year (1999, 2001, 2002) and European Goalkeeper of the Year (1999, 2000, 2001, 2002), all testimony to his towering stature within the game.

After a 21-year career at the highest level, Kahn finally hung up his gloves in May 2008. Two years earlier, in the third-place play-off at the 2006 FIFA World Cup on home soil, the Titan had brought down the curtain on an international career for Germany spanning 86 matches, 49 of which he played as captain.

FIFA.com spoke exclusively to the former custodian about his new role as a TV studio expert, this summer's FIFA World Cup finals in South Africa, and issues currently affecting the German team.

FIFA.com: Jens Lehmann, your long-term rival in the Germany goal, has announced his retirement at the end of the season. What was your reaction to the news?
Oliver Kahn: I picked up on it, as you do. It's a logical decision. As an elite athlete, you're always asking yourself how long you can maintain your current level of performance. The best time to stop is when people repeatedly say to you, ‘you’re basically still in great shape'.

Would you play in a Jens Lehmann farewell match?
Of course I would, why not? It was always put about that we were somehow bitter enemies. But we weren’t: we were sporting rivals, and that’s all there was to it.

Another major media debate in Germany concerns Kevin Kuranyi (who was ejected from the national team for disciplinary reasons). Should he be reinstated or not? What are the chances of that happening?
Joachim Low has a decent choice of strikers, including [Miroslav] Klose, [Lukas] Podolski, [Mario] Gomez, [Stefan] Kiessling, and on current form Kuranyi. But if you slavishly followed a philosophy of just picking form players, you’d be fielding a different national team every month. Low needs to consider this extremely carefully, because he'd have to cut one of his strikers out of the squad. And it’s not easy for a national coach to simply say, ‘go on then, I’ll take a player who’s not appeared for Germany for months now'.

By contrast, Germany have already settled on their goalkeeper. Rene Adler is officially the new No1. Is that the right decision, and was it announced at the right time? Four years ago, the decision to go with Lehmann rather than yourself wasn't taken until just before the tournament…
I hope we'll soon be back to the situation where we won't be debating the timing of a decision, because we've finally found a man we can consistently trust, like you had with me, and like you have with [Edwin] van der Sar, [Iker] Casillas or [Petr] Cech, where you have a clearly-defined first-choice keeper.

I'd have taken the decision a lot earlier myself, just to settle it once and for all. We've somehow arrived at a situation where it's regarded as sensible to delay this kind of call for as long as possible, but I reject that. A goalkeeper needs to emerge and continue developing before he can characterise an era. Obviously, Rene Adler mustn’t make any more mistakes, or the whole debate will reopen. But if he keeps making the saves we’re used to seeing from him, the debate will soon die down. And as it happens, this particular debate involves some very good candidates.