That, too, was a strike which defied his reputation as "a man of small goals", as West Germany coach Helmut Schön once described him. Müller's second, however, was on a higher plane yet. Of instinct, control and audacity. For Reina, it was the fuel of nightmares. Pure, distilled torment.
Like many of Bayern's most ominous moves during the1970s, this one started with Franz Beckenbauer. The captain shuffles the ball forward to Jupp Kapellmann, who pushes it further upfield. Hoeness gets muscled out of possession but jogs back to mop up, before laying the ball off to Rainer Zobel. The tempo is languid, breezy, deceptive.
All this time, Müller has been lurking in front of the defence, waiting for his moment. Zobel provides it with a wonderful chipped pass. And there, on the edge of the area, Müller sprints to meet the ball, letting it bounce at his side. The spin from Zobel's pass holds it up awkwardly, but Müller adjusts. He hasn't once glanced at goal or Reina's position, slightly off his line. He doesn’t need to. He knows. And with a swivel of the hips, he dinks the ball skyward.
Everything inside the stadium stops. Except for the ball– its arc high and graceful. And Reina, stumbling backwards, leaping. Time slows, enough perhaps for Müller to recall his introduction to then Bayern coach Zlatko Čajkovski ten years earlier. "I am not putting that little elephant in among my string of thoroughbreds," vows the Croatian, who also coined the striker's other famous nickname: 'Kleines dickes Müller' (Short, fat Müller).
But Müller was neither. He was 'Der Bomber' – and never more so than when his perfect lob, all vision and application, dropped under Reina's bar, landed behind the goal line, and detonated.
