To a generation of England fans, the sight of Jürgen Grabowski arriving on the pitch will always be associated with the cruel dashing of their World Cup hopes. In the quarter-final of the 1970 tournament in Leon, Mexico, England were two goals up early in the second half, seemingly cruising to victory against their arch-rivals, the West Germans. Then the German manager, Helmut Schön, sent on Grabowski, a skilful pacey winger. The Germans pulled a goal back and Grabowski exposed England’s left flank to constant attack, skipping past the left-back Terry Cooper, tiring in the heat.
When Grabowski came on, recalled the England midfielder Bobby Charlton, “for the first time the Germans looked capable of hurting us as Cooper struggled to contain his new and faster opponent”.
The Germans equalised shortly before the final whistle. In extra time the decisive moment came when Grabowski once again turned Cooper inside and out, before crossing the ball to the far post. It was nodded back by Hennes Löhr and Gerd Müller volleyed the winner.
Substitutes were then a novelty in international football and the German press promptly dubbed Grabowski “the best substitute in the world”. However, the “supersub” reputation irritated Grabowski, as he felt it underplayed his contributions when he started matches for West Germany, as well as for his club side Eintracht Frankfurt. He suspected too that the West German management never showed the same loyalty to him as they did to players from more fashionable clubs such as Bayern Munich.
Grabowski went on to shine in the epic semi-final, which West Germany lost 4-3 to Italy after extra time. He also played in the team that vanquished England again in 1972 at Wembley with a 3-1 win, which was to prove decisive in knocking England out of the final stages of the European Championship.
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His finest hour as an international player came in the 1974 World Cup. The tournament did not start well for him. In the group stages the West Germans suffered a humiliating 1-0 defeat to East Germany, and Grabowski felt he had been scapegoated when he was dropped from the starting line-up for the next game.
However, later in the tournament he came on in his famous substitute role and scored a crucial goal against Sweden. He remained in the team for the final against the Netherlands, played in Munich on his 30th birthday, July 7, 1974. The Dutch were favourites and went ahead with an early penalty after Johan Cruyff, then the best player in the world, made a majestic run into the penalty area and was fouled. The West Germans equalised with a penalty of their own, and with the game finely poised at 1-1 Grabowski played a typically incisive pass down the right wing, Rainer Bonhof ran on and squared the ball across the area, where Müller turned and rifled in the winner.
“The feeling at the final whistle was indescribable,” Grabowski remembered. “I thought, ‘The world belongs to me’.”
It was in some ways a bittersweet moment. Frustrated by his constant movement in and out of the team, and being played on the wing rather than in the more central role he preferred, Grabowski had told the management a few days before that this would be his last international match, after 44 appearances and five goals. “I was never satisfied with the national team,” he said later. “I simply couldn’t show there how I might have been able to play.” He continued to excel at club level but when Schön tried to tempt him back into the squad for the 1978 World Cup, Grabowski refused.
His dream of World Cup glory first took shape as a young boy playing amid the shattered landscapes of postwar Germany. He was born in 1944 in Wiesbaden, just before the war ended. His father was a keen amateur footballer: “I always wanted to be a footballer, it was somehow in my blood,” Grabowski believed.
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While his father was known as a tough defender, Grabowski’s talents quickly emerged as more technical. He played endless street football where good ball control was key. His was instinctive. “I never had to practise passing, shooting, dribbling,” he said. “It was all there from the beginning.” Having to play against much older boys also motivated him to use skill to overcome what he lacked in strength.
His idols were the West German players who won the World Cup in Switzerland in 1954, a big psychological moment in the country’s recovery of at least some patriotic pride after the deep shame of Nazism. “As a ten-year-old, I stood in front of a radio and TV shop and watched the final. And I thought — if only you could one day achieve something like that!”
After a highly successful junior career Grabowski signed in 1965 for the Bundesliga team Eintracht Frankfurt on a salary of 1,000 deutschmarks a month. He continued initially to live with his parents but treated himself to the purchase of a bright-red Triumph Spitfire — cars, he admitted, “were always my weakness”.
He quickly made his mark for the elegance of his play, his turn of speed and ability to cross and shoot with both feet. Within a year he had been called into the West German squad travelling to the 1966 World Cup in England, though he did not play.
He went on to make 441 appearances in the Bundesliga for Eintracht, scoring 109 goals, adored by local fans as “Grabi”. In 1968 Bayern Munich had tried to sign him, but his club refused to sell and Grabowski said he was pleased. “I might have had more success at Bayern but I was at the team near where I grew up, which is where I wanted to be from the beginning and they wanted me. I never regretted it.”
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With Eintracht he won two West German cup medals. However, he missed the club’s greatest moment, their 1980 victory in the final of the Uefa Cup. Grabowski had suffered a severe foot injury a few weeks before after a tackle by Lothar Matthäus in a Bundesliga game, and that ended his career.
In his retirement from football he ran an insurance agency with his wife, Helga, who survives him, retained his close association with Eintracht and further indulged his passion for fast cars as well as golf. Ill health clouded his final years.
Grabowski was much admired not only for this footballing skill but also for his affable personality, and devotion to a single club. However, there seemed, some said, to be a persistent melancholy as he looked back on a career in which he had not always felt fully appreciated.
Yet his 1974 World Cup triumph, first dreamt of as a boy on the streets, was real enough. And England fans certainly knew that he should never be underestimated.
Jürgen Grabowski, footballer, was born on July 7, 1944. He died of multiple organ failure on March 10, 2022, aged 77