Tor!: The Story of German Football
Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 095401345X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
‘We even had well over 25,000 people in the early 1970s, in the Second Division.’ Right. ‘This place,’ they will animatedly add, making a flourishing gesture that takes in the whole ground, ‘was always packed.’ Wrong. The thing I remember most vividly about the early to mid-1980s is feeling completely lost, standing on a half-empty terrace, a group of about 50 neo-Nazi thugs goose-stepping around and waiting for the police to arrive to get the action going, with some drab game trying to develop
Zebec’s alcohol problems were common knowledge, which placed added pressure on the team. Five weeks later, Hamburg lost out on two trophies within four days. On May 24, they were defeated at Leverkusen, which practically gifted Bayern the championship, then on May 28, they lost a depressing European Cup final to Nottingham Forest. Afterwards, the players decided to drink their sorrows away. Zebec watched in disgust, because there was still one game to be played in the league and, who knows,
dribbler nor a crosser. And then there was Cologne’s Bernd Schuster, arguably the most talented German player since Beckenbauer and Netzer. He was only 20 when he went to Italy for the 1980 European Championship. It was a dreadful tournament (dubbed ‘a hideous disfigurement of football’ in the official West German account), which the Germans won because they played two decent halves while no other team could produce more than one. The first came against Holland and brought three goals, all
that had only indirectly to do with football. Defender Rudi Gramlich (Eintracht Frankfurt), a leather trader in his day job, had gone home before the semi-final because his Jewish employers needed his help – they were beginning to feel the effects of the Nazi-inspired boycotts. And Nerz had thrown Siggi Haringer (Bayern Munich) out of the team after the game against the Czechs for eating an orange on a station platform – the first but not the last time a German national coach would demonstrate
walk of life’ includes football. Soon, Germany’s writers, journalists, authors and fans would use the evolving struggle between Gladbach and Bayern as a symbol. Politics, philosophy, art and sometimes even sport – whatever there was that needed classification, you could bet somebody was there who would argue it all boiled down to Gladbach v Bayern, Netzer v Beckenbauer, Good v Evil. Now that Bayern had made it to the top, Gladbach wasted little time in drawing level. They won the league in