“Mr. Hitchcock, how did you do that?” is the title of a book by the French director François Truffaut. Published in 1966, it reproduces an approximately 50-hour interview between the master director and the master director. Truffaut, who also worked as a film critic, asked Alfred Hitchcock about his almost 50 films, and his colleague Helen Scott translated. The work is considered a classic of film history, full of details, insights and anecdotes, all from first hand.
Javier Cáceres, a journalist at the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” since 2002, didn’t have nearly as much time for his interviews, and footballers are also considered interview partners with a sometimes clear flow of speech. What Cáceres, born in Santiago de Chile in 1970, has put together in his recently published book “Goals as Painted” is all the more astonishing.
The foreword by Argentine football legend Jorge Valdano alone is a delight. How the 1986 world champion describes the overarching goal of the game of games, as emotional and blissful as a winning goal in stoppage time. “The goal is the glory itself,” sums up Valdano, and this can be clearly felt in the following 300-plus pages.
Javier Cáceres has been very close to his job as a football journalist for decades and has interviewed a number of players. One day the idea arose to not only let her talk, but to get her to draw. The motif – their most important goal, to paraphrase Truffaut: Mr. Beckenbauer, Monsieur Platini, Señor Di Stefano, Ms. Künzer, Mister Lineker, how did you do that?
The result is an intensive contemporary document that provides snapshots of the producers themselves. Who could describe a goal more impressively than the scorer himself? If there is also a drawing of himself, even better. As expected, the stylistic range is wide.
Carlos Valderrama’s 2-0 win against Colombia at the 1990 World Cup looks almost as disheveled as the kicker’s own hairstyle. Jimmy Hartwig’s voice is heard in the 1-0 win for HSV against Bayern (final score 2-1) from the 1983/84 season to literally hear: “Here stood one. Here stood one. Here stood one. Here stood one. Here stood Jimmy,” plus the players as googly figures – great.
Kaiser Franz outlines it concisely and to the point, as does Günther Netzer. Jay Jay Okocha has ants typing across the picture and Alfredo di Stéfano’s drawing could also adorn a teenager’s school desk – sometimes it looks like a telephone scribble, sometimes like a tactics board, authentic across the board, even in the simplest line.
“Goals as Painted” began back in 2005. At that time, Javier Cáceres was sitting with Leonel Sánchez, one of the Chilean heroes of the 1962 World Cup. On a memorable evening, after a few beers, he drew his goal in the 1-0 win against Russia ( Final score 2:1). Equally memorable was the encounter with Gerd Müller and the circumstances surrounding his drawing or the complications in the case of Günther Netzer, as Cáceres recounts in the afterword, which is worth reading.
Cáceres collected all of these drawings in a small Moleskine notebook, and now he is making them available to fans in this book, which is worth reading and seeing. Who came up with the cover photo, which only gives the goal a net where the ball flies? That shouldn’t be revealed at this point. A little tip: The man netted four figures. Or so they claim.
“The book is more than a book, it is great fun and a great adventure, a journalistic masterpiece,” wrote the critic Benjamin Henrichs in the “Süddeutsche” about Truffaut’s “Mr. Hitchcock, how did you do that?” . A praise that can be passed on directly to Javier Cáceres: “Goals as if painted” is a book as if painted, a kick from the first to the last page.