The remarkable second coming of Anthony Modeste, Köln’s ‘life insurance’ | Andy Brassell


The French forward’s remarkable return to form at 33 is one of the stories of this Bundesliga season

It was an evening of not one ending, but two, in Lower Saxony. It took two nods of Anthony Modeste’s head; the first, of the gentlest kind, to score one of the easiest goals of his curious career and end a mini-drought, the second a more forceful show of aerial power to provide an 89th-minute winner and send Köln’s travelling supporters into ecstasy. “My strength is my heading, not my right or my left foot as you saw in that move,” he laughed afterwards with some self-deprecation, having missed an arguably better chance 10 minutes before.

The look of deflation on the face of Florian Kohfeldt, the Wolfsburg manager, after another defeat was all down to Modeste, whose incredible return to form at 33 is one of the stories of this Bundesliga season. The Frenchman is also the scorer of more headed goals than anybody else in the league so far, and of more headers than anyone at this stage of a Bundesliga campaign since the towering Jan Koller for Borussia Dortmund in 2004-05. So plus ça change for Effzeh’s centre-forward, you might say. To dismiss it as a given, however, would underplay the journey to get here.

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