Then there was Bert Trautmann, the Man City goalie of my youth... Bert was a paratrooper in the Luftwaffe until he was captured. He wouldn't return to Germany and lived a quiet life in Lancashire until he was discovered to be a superb goalkeeper. He played for City for fifteen years and slowly but surely gained a reputation as a great bloke, an Anglophile who did a huge amount towards fixing Anglo-German relations and, well, an all-round good egg. Sometimes we are branded by the place of our birth. There's still too much of that going on.