Sliding doors moments are common in football. Being in the right place at the right time is often what leads to a big-money move or a fruitful career trajectory, and that was certainly the case for Paul Lambert.
The former Scotland international had been a consistent performer for St Mirren and Motherwell in the first decade of his career, but a UEFA Cup match against Borussia Dortmund was where everything changed.
And Lambert, interviewed in the latest edition of FourFourTwo magazine, admits that he very nearly missed the game that first alerted him to Dortmund, where he would later win the Champions League.
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"I came so close to missing that game," he says. "I was waiting on my son to be born and I’d had a chat with the manager, Alex McLeish, to say that if there had been no progress, I couldn’t play. He was supportive of that. My son was born, thankfully we had no issues, and I was cleared to play.
"The away leg was an incredible experience and adrenaline carried me through. I’d never played in front of a crowd like that. I thought, ‘What a place this is to play football’. You would’ve had to have been living on the moon not to know their players – all household names – but we held our own and did well to lose only 1-0. I thought I gave a good account of myself, but didn’t think anything of it.
"I know now that Michael Henke, who was a coach at Dortmund and later joined my own backroom staff, had been sent to watch me a few times after that Motherwell game. They had monitored my progress. At the end of the 1995-96 season, they’d lost Steffen Freund to a knee injury and asked me to go there on trial. The rest is history."
Lambert also attracted the attention of PSV Eindhoven. “I was friendly with Rab McKinnon, who had just moved from Motherwell to FC Twente, and I asked how he’d gone about that,” he says. “I was out of contract and hadn’t got my head around the new Bosman ruling. Rab asked if the agent who’d brokered his transfer could phone me – a Dutchman named Ton van Dalen. He asked me to jump on a plane to Enschede, which meant I had to pull a sickie from Motherwell’s pre-season trip to Northampton.
“Ton said he was going to take me to train with two teams, but only told me the first one: PSV. I trained with them and actually scored a couple of goals in a game, playing on the wing. I was never a winger, not least because I wasn’t quick enough! Dick Advocaat thanked me but said, pretty cryptically, ‘I know you’re going somewhere else’.
“We went back to the car and Ton told me we were going to Borussia Dortmund. I thought, ‘Wow’. I had no idea that was the plan. I knew that I couldn’t go back to Motherwell after going AWOL. All I could think about was the big impression that Dortmund had made on me when we’d played those two games against them.”
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