Best Bundesliga Goals 2006/2007 (1/5): Rafael van der Vaart

By: Jan | May 25th, 2007

Diego – Preuß – Schlaudraff – Hitzlsperger – van der Vaart – Honorable Mentions

This is my personal selection of the five best goals of this years Bundesliga season. This selection is completely biased towards goals that are still available online. My apologies to those players whose efforts were taken down by some Bundesliga TV rights activists. I have decided to turn this feature into a five-part series in order to milk as many blog entries from it as possible.

Let us start with a goal by Rafael van der Vaart (nicknamed “Little Angel”) against Bayern Munich. It was the equaliser in a match that Hamburg went on to win 2:1 with the second goal coming from Paolo Guerrero.

It was matchday 31 and one of many defeats Bayern Munich had to endure to this point in the season. Bayern no longer had any chances to win the championship or at least reach the Champions League and rumours about potential transfers to change the face of the failed squad were already floating around. Rafael van der Vaart was one of the candidates but after this match he gave a TV interview in which he clearly stated that he won’t join Munich in the summer. Now after the season has finished he also revealed why in an interview with German newspaper Sport Bild. He said that back in 2005 Bayern Munich wasn’t interested to sign him claiming that he wasn’t good enough. So he moved to Hamburg, feelings were hurt and Bayern Munich’s insight two years later came too late. Since his mother is from Spain he would much rather like to play for a club like Real Madrid. Let’s hope Real officials haven’t read his statements so that we can keep this player in the league for a bit longer. And he doesn’t just score awesome goals but also delivers hard to imitate match deciding assists from time to time…