Mark McGhee made his Hamburg debut in the Westfalenstadion, Dortmund, where Scotland will open their Euro 2016 qualifying campaign on Sunday night. Newly signed from Aberdeen, where he had won the Cup Winners’ Cup, his first appearance in the Bundesliga did not quite go to plan.
Although his team won 2-1 thanks to a late goal by Felix Magath, a week of illness and injury caught up with McGhee, whose performance was a disappointment. Klaus Fischer, the West Germany striker famous for his bicycle kicks, was among those who put the boot in.
“The thing that always sticks in my mind is a quote from Fischer at the beginning of the week when he said he thought Aberdeen had sent over my brother,” McGhee says. “That was his appraisal of my debut. I felt that was a bit hard.
“I spent the week before the game with poison in my toes and could hardly train. I was playing when I probably shouldn’t have and the night before the game — for the only time in my life before a game — I had some sort of stomach upset and was up most of the night. I didn’t perform all that well.”
McGhee remembers that match, which was just over 30 years ago, with a degree of fondness, even if his contribution to it was less than cultured. “I was booked in the first two minutes for cementing the goalie,” he says. “I explained to the referee: ‘that’s what we do in Scotland’. So I am hoping for a slightly better experience in Dortmund this time.”
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McGhee returns to the Ruhr Valley as Scotland’s assistant manager, thrilled by the prospect of taking on the world champions in a stadium that is renowned for its atmosphere. Located in Germany’s industrial heartland, it is loud, proud and, for many unassuming visitors, a daunting experience, but McGhee is confident that the national side will respond positively.
“The noise is brilliant,” he says. “It’s one of those where I’ve always felt that the noise seems orchestrated. The chanting you get when you name the team — I think that’s where it originated. It’s just brilliant. But we have players playing in the Champions League, the Premiership and the Championship, playing in big, big stadia all the time. Most of the boys have played at Wembley, some in Barcelona and all over.
“So the stadium will only inspire them. There is certainly no danger of them being intimidated in any way by the atmosphere or stadium.”
On the pitch, McGhee’s 18 months at Hamburg were not a success, but he loved the city and he made many friends there. To this day, he keeps in touch with several, including Bernd Wehmeyer — now Hamburg’s general manager — and Magath “when he answers his phone. He’s under a wee bit of pressure at Fulham”.
More than anything, it broadened McGhee’s outlook, on life and football. He says that, in Germany, he discovered a different level of professionalism and commitment, which the British game is catching up with only now.
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“People prepared for training,” he says. “They didn’t train any harder than us, but they prepared harder. That was another level for me and it was right through the game and culture. It’s taken a long time to get to that point, but we are more like that here now.”
The gulf between Scotland and Germany needs no elaboration. Several of Joachim Löw’s World Cup-winning squad will be absent on Sunday, including Philipp Lahm, Per Mertesacker and Miroslav Klose — who have retired from international football — as well as the injured Bastian Schweinsteiger, but McGhee expects Mario Gómez and Marco Reus to compensate for those losses.
While the talent is frightening, it is not their biggest asset, according to McGhee. What separates Germany from the world’s other most talented teams is their work ethic.
“It’s at the heart of everything they do,” he says. “That, for me, is the thing that overrides. They won the World Cup because they had better players than everyone else, but ultimately, they won because these players worked harder than any other team. Their attention to detail was superb.”