When the fervent fans of VfL Bochum accompanied this flight ball with cheering screams on the way to the Freiburg goal, the art shooter already knew what would become reality a little later.
"After the ball left my foot, I knew it was going in, you always have that feeling," said Milos Pantovic, the 25-year-old VfL striker, about his magic from the 82nd minute with the On Saturday the 2-1 victory of the Bundesliga climbers over the top club from Breisgau, which had been defeated for the third time in a row, was sealed.
Art does not need an explanation or an instruction manual. In football, too, it arises from the feeling of being able to decorate an event with something special. The 25-year-old Serb, who switched from FC Bayern Munich's offspring to the traditional Revierklub in 2018, has this intuition for the special moment. In the past three weeks he has even enriched a first division game twice with an extra shot of ingenuity.
What the pro, who sometimes tends to self-doubt on dreary days, achieved this time with the help of the inside of his right foot when he catapulted the ball into the air from a goal distance of 44 meters like a golfer at a hole in one, so that it was shortly before his goal served and then landed up in the Freiburg network (82nd minute), he succeeded in a different way in the 2-0 home win over TSG 1899 Hoffenheim in the seventh minute of stoppage time.
At that time, thanks to a low shot with the left foot from 66 meters into the opponent's goal, which was also abandoned this time. As on November 6th, when the Hoffenheim goalkeeper Baumann rushed forward with a corner kick from his team shortly before the goal was closed, his Freiburg colleague Flekken left his actual workplace on Saturday to be able to intercept a Bochum counterattack. Bad luck for him that the Freiburg central defender Lienhart, who had headed the 1-0 lead for Baden (51st), slipped so unhappily during a previous attempt at clarification that he brought the intuitively into position Pantovic into play.
“I saw that the goalkeeper was standing far out, and I had a feeling of where the ball could fall,” said the attacker, who was substituted on after 65 minutes, describing the moment of his goal-oriented orientation, “and then I trust myself to do something like that.” As His unmistakable suspicion had become the goal of the match day for the special moment, the cheers in the traditional Bochum football arena exploded, as the fans had become eyewitnesses of an unbelievable goal.
It was up to VfL coach Thomas Reis to include this wonderful moment in the overall context of his astonishingly productive work with a squad that some people had doubted at the beginning of the season about its possible lack of top-flight quality.
What the self-proclaimed “instinctive footballer” Pantovic, who was always substituted on or off for VfL in ten appearances in his re-promotion season, raised to an art form on Saturday, “is not specially trained here,” said the Bochum football teacher, “he recognized the situation well and at the moment just magical ”. Reis, type of buddy and strict soccer teacher at the same time, also used the opportunity to criticize his match winner a little.
After all, shortly after his dream hit, Pantovic had the, at first glance, much closer opportunity to also score 3: 1 from the short distance in the duel with Flekken (87th). The Serbian did not manage to make the seemingly simple, unlike the currently seeded center forward Polter, who shot the 1-1 with a low shot past Flekken (54th).
Ballistic artist Pantovic has to wait for another dream to come true: to be part of the Bochum team from the beginning to the end.
Despite all the enthusiasm for a hit with a high memorable value, Reis did not want to commit himself.
“The team has grown closer together,” he said, also referring to the competition for the most coveted places, in which even the Serbian boy prodigy still has to unleash potential for improvement.
It is up to him to find the right balance between long-range spell and melee determination.