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Lambert: German joy

When you play against someone like Zinedine Zidane, having come from Motherwell in a year, you have to step up to the plate.

Paul Lambert
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• Wycombe Wanderers

Paul Lambert might have marked Zinedine Zidane out of the game on his way to a Champions League winners' medal, but he is still putting it down to luck.

The Wycombe Wanderers boss dropped in on Goals on Sunday to cast his mind back to his playing days, when he became the only Scottish player to win Europe's premier club competition in its new format.

Lambert's amazing rise to the pinnacle of the game took him from Motherwell to Borussia Dortmund - with a little nudge from Dick Advocaat along the way.

"I must be the luckiest player alive!" he told Goals on Sunday. "An agent called me and asked me to have a trial with PSV Eindhoven, so I went over there and ended up playing wide right. Now I couldn't beat anybody, I had no pace whatsoever to get tom the byeline and cross it!

"So Dick Advocaat just said 'OK, you're going to Dortmund on trial', so I went from Eindhoven to Dortmund and me still as a Motherwell player believe it or not.

"I played four games on trial there. I'd always wanted to play aborad to be honest. I'd always wanted to gp and give it a go, but we knew the players Dortmund had because we'd played against them in the Uefa Cup one year.

"But I had the chance to play against Schalke - which is a derby game - Borussia Mönchengladbach, Hamburg and a small team called Lubek. I played the four games and did OK in them, so they asked me to sign."

Astronomical

Sign he did and although he only spent one season at the Westfallenstadion it was some season.

Dortmund, under the guidance of Ottmar Hitzfeld made it all the way to the Champions League final, but even then they were massive underdogs against the might of Juventus.

But with Lambert keeping tabs on Zidande and even breaking free from his defensive duties to set up one of Karl-Heinze Riedle's two goals, the Germans prevailed.

And all of a sudden the man who had started at St Mirren was suddenly the first Brit to win the competition with a club outside the United Kingdom.

"The Champions League was absolutely astronomical," he said. "To have won it, it's not until now that you look back and realise that was really nice.

"When you play against someone like Zinedine Zidane, having come from Motherwell in a year, you have to step up to the plate.

"I was probably the worst player in the Dortmund side that year! I played with (Matthias) Sammer, Andreas Moller, (Karl-Heinze) Riedle, Jurgen Kohler, (Stephane) Chapuisat and Paolo Sosa, so I played with some really, really top players."

But Lambert's love affair with Germany did not end there.

After moving back to Scotland with Celtic, he finally hung up his boots and returned to the scene of his greatest triumph to take his coaching courses. And having worked with some of the Bundesliga's brightest footballing minds, he admits he owes Germany an even greater debt of gratitude

Culture

"I wanted to learn something different," he said. "I went there to play for a different experience and even if my experience didn't go that well in Dortmund I always wanted to go just for the different culture.

"Fortunately enough the football went reasonably OK and I wanted to do the same to become a manager or a coach.

"I thought I'll give it a go and was lucky enough to get in. It was a hell of an experience to do it in Germany."