Jonathan Wilson catches up with Yugoslav goalkeeping legend Vladimir Beara, who turns 80 this year. Such was Beara’s reputation that when Russian keeper Lev Yashin won the European Footballer of the Year award in 1963, he said that it was Beara who was in fact the best shot-stopper in the world.
Beara told Wilson that his greatest disappointment was losing 2-0 to West Germany in the quarterfinals of the 1954 World Cup, thanks to an own goal and a second goal conceded when he could hardly move due to injury. A bigger factor in the defeat, however, was that each team member had been promised a Vespa if the Yugoslavs won by the president of the country’s soccer federation, Rato Dugonjic. “But then on the day of the Germany game, Dugonjic came and said there were no scooters,” said Beara, “and that it wasn’t good for us to play like the bourgeoisie when other people had to work just to buy food. Suddenly we were public enemy No.1, and we hadn’t even asked for anything. So after that, we were depressed.”
Beara described his era as “the time of romantic football. There were still lots of good moves, dribbles and attractive goals. Tactics still hadn’t eaten football. It was the playing style of the 1962 World Cup and then in England in 1966 that started the new era of football when the ball was no longer the most important thing in the game.” Nonetheless, today’s goalkeeper “still has to be a lot like he was in my time. He has to have courage and self-confidence.”