Deisler is beating the demons

the Institute, Magath decided to start Deisler in a Bundesliga game for the first time in four months.

After a stiff, nervy performance in the first half against Freiburg, Oliver Kahn told Deisler during the interval: "Loosen up. You don't need to be scared of anything. You've so much talent. Just do it and score." Minutes after the restart, Deisler shimmied past his marker, cut inside and scored a brilliant goal.

His colleagues were ecstatic, with Kahn himself sprinting to the half-way line to embrace him. Bayern normally polarise the German footballing public yet this was a goal to delight the whole country. Germany had long known their prodigy, a quiet, small-town boy from Lorrach, didn't enjoy the spotlight that went with the growing appreciation of his rare talent. When he made his name at Hertha Berlin, he said: "I just want to play football. I've become somebody I never wanted to be."

The pressure only built when his severely injured right knee forced him to miss the 2002 World Cup and helplessly sit out his first nine months at Bayern, where his only real friend was said to be team-mate, Mehmet Scholl.

Strangely, he had started looking the part for Bayern when the depression really took hold. He himself asked for the news of his plight to be made public to stop wild and damaging rumours.

"A typical case of depression, the result of the combination of several factors, not only the pressure from the outside world but also the pressure he put on himself," Professor Holsboer explained, revealing also how Deisler's worries had been made worse by worries over the pregnancy complications being suffered by his partner Eunice.

The openness about his condition could not stop speculation about its root, with newspapers raking up his parents' divorce and musing on Deisler's conversion to Buddhism, to which he'd been introduced by Scholl. Reports, denied by the club, that Bayern were also monitoring some of his friends apparently enraged Deisler. "Who has the right to spy on me?" he asked.

Still, he had recovered well enough to end his time in the psychiatric hospital and the trouble-free birth of baby Raphael made him, team-mates noted, "less introverted and a lot happier" when he returned to training a couple of months later. Still, though, his impatient streak was tested to the full when he couldn't get a game for five months.

Ever since, inevitably, there have been question marks, especially after the Turin lapse, but Magath is a believer. His promise "to do everything to integrate Basti in the team" has been backed by his decision to start Deisler in most of Bayern's recent games.

They say he still doesn't look the player he was, that he won't be a big threat to Chelsea. "So what?" reckon the regulars at Bayern's Sabener Strasse complex who hear Deisler report that "things are getting better and better all the time". The club knows that this is not about the rebuilding of the player but of the man - and the only thing which matters is that the man is training with a smile on his face again.