Day the curtain came down on Eastern goals

Ian Hawkey

• Last Updated: November 14. 2009 8:29PM UAE / November 14. 2009 4:29PM GMT

On November 15, 1989, the last European places for the World Cup in Italy were being decided. In Austria an especially charged fixture was scheduled. A talented team representing East Germ-any went there needing a draw to qualify for the great showpiece the following summer. But the players could hardly help but glance behind them at the country they were representing. East Germany, the DDR, a country demonised for its restrictions, its secret police and its political dogmas, was the focus of the world and had been for the previous six days, as its major symbol, the Berlin Wall was picked apart, brick by brick, the Cold War melting before the eyes of the planet, the Iron Curtain wrenched from its rails.

Twenty years on, the then manager of that DDR team sighs at the recollection of those dramatic days. “For us as a team the Wall fell just a bit too early,” says Eduard Geyer, who had overseen the most successful World Cup qualifying campaign by a DDR squad since the early 1970s, when an East German team qualified for the only time in the country’s brief history. The players didn’t have their minds focused because of the events.”

Austria won 3-0 in that decisive match in Vienna, and went to Italy at the expense of the DDR. The rest is history. A German team went on to win that World Cup, the last team to go to a major tournament calling itself “West” Germany and the victorious head coach looked forward to the fruits of unification for his sport.

“With the East now joining us, we’ll be unbeatable,” predicted Franz Beckenbauer.

Football certainly changed with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Look only at how Europe, 20 years after East Germany played their last competitive game, shapes up for the final steps towards the 2010 World Cup.

If the so-called Eastern Bloc still existed, we would not be anticipating Bosnia-Herzegovina striving to make it past Portugal to South Africa next summer, nor wondering if Slovenia might join them there. Rather, we would be talking of Yugoslavia and meaning Serbians, Croatians, Bosnians, Slovenians, Macedonians and Montenegrins all together under one flag, wearing one jersey. We would not have been monitoring the prospects of Ukraine in one play-off and Russia in another. In the years up to the late 1980s, they were in the same Soviet Union as the USSR or as the CIS.

As for Germany, the story of unification and football is complex.

Beckenbauer was incorrect in imagining that the West German champions of 1990 would, by adding its brothers from the East, turn into super-champions.

Certainly, the core of what had been the West German national XI gained some useful players from unification – 33 former Ossis, or Easterners, have played for the German national team in the last 20 years – and when, in 1996, they won their last major senior prize, the European Championship, the defensive skills of Matthias Sammer, a former DDR international, made as strong an impression as the familiar courage and finishing of Jurgen Klinsmann, the captain of united Germany and World Cup winner with West Germany. But the joining of forces was not always smooth, and even now some old inequalities and prejudices still govern the relationship between German football’s two halves.

East German football was always a slightly poorer cousin to its immediate neighbour. It had a smaller population and, being organised under communism, its Oberliga lacked the recruitment mechanisms that would develop rapidly in a professional Bundesliga on the other side of the Wall.

By the late 1970s, West German football was bringing into its league some of the most garlan-ded stars of the global game, European Footballers of the Year, like the Dane Allan Simonsen and the Englishman Kevin Keegan.

East German football was precisely the opposite. Movements were restricted, transfers within the country’s walled borders were rare and strictly ordained by the ministry of sport. Fees were non-existent, footballers’ salaries only paid secretly.

“Officially, all players in the East had been amateurs,” recalls Uwe Rosler, a leading centre-forward with Magdeburg in the DDR.

“Of course, we weren’t, and you would get the biggest bonus if your team got a result against Dynamo Berlin, because everybody knew they were the club of the Stasi, the secret police. You especially wan-ted to beat them. They had some help from referees but were also strong. The Oberliga was a good standard, although the East German national team was not.”

Indeed, while East German clubs had their moments in European club competitions – Magdeburg won the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1974, Lokomotiv Leipzig reached the final in 1987 and Carl Zeiss Jena were runners-up in 1981 – the national DDR XI generally failed to match the glories that the country’s track and field athletes regularly conferred on the state at Olympic Games (although many medallists, it emerged, had been given steroids).

They did, though, manage one important coup, defeating West Germany 1-0 in the group phase of the 1974 World Cup in Hamburg. Loyalists celebrated behind the Wall, while the players kept their triumphalism private. Jurgen Sparwasser, the goalscorer, was forbidden to join his colleagues out on the town that night; a photo of him carousing in the laissez-faire West could have been damaging propaganda.

Sparwasser defected 14 years later, as did the players Falko Goetz, Jurgen Pahl and Norbert Nachtweih, each of them taking advantage of trips abroad to seek asylum in the West and pursue careers in the Bundesliga after serving Fifa bans of some 12 months for breaking their contracts. For their generation, the West German game seemed tantalizingly close.

“In many parts of the East, We could pick up Bundesliga matches on TV and could see the standard was strong,” says Rosler. “That was especially true in the late 1980s, when West Germany was about to win the World Cup.”

Rosler saw distinctions, too, in the way the game was played in capitalist Germany and the methods taught on his side of the frontier.

“The emphasis was different,” he recalls. “In the East, it was all about teamwork and togetherness. In the West, I saw more individualistic thinking, the power of cliques, of a powerful press and personal politics around team selection.”

Rosler was one of the first footballers to cross the old divide when the Wall came down. The eagerness of players to discover Bundesliga wealth meant a drain of talent from the Oberliga clubs, who later struggled to make their mark in a unified league. That eagerness in turn was matched by the hunger of West German clubs to recruit talent previously put out of bounds.

Andreas Thom, Thomas Doll, Ulf Kirsten and Sammer arrived at West German clubs in the 1989/90 season and were soon featuring in the newly united national team. But there was a culture shock for many of them.

“The Wall was still there in some people’s heads and in many ways I felt naïve,” recalls Rosler, who joined Nuremberg and thrived enough to move on to the English Premier League.

It was not that he lacked the right sporting disciplines – far from it, explains Rosler, but that the East Germans were underprepared for some of the psychological demands of professionalism.

“Most of us had been in specialist sports schools for our later education, where you’d be examined every year,” Rosler says. “And the coaches were top class. But what we lacked was mental strength. We couldn’t develop our responsibilities, our leadership, because they wanted everyone to be equal.”



That stereotyping of East German footballers, or those brought up under the sign of the hammer and sickle, still persists. Just ask Michael Ballack, the captain of Germany. Ballack was 13 when the Wall came down, and he had grown up very much on the Eastern side of it.

He lived on The Fritz Heckert Estate – named after a workers’ leader – on Salvador Allende Strasse – after a Chilean socialist – in what was then called Karl-Marx Stadt. His sporting gifts had been identified from a young age and he enrolled at a local sporting academy, with a timetable that scheduled four hours a day for football training and about the same to classroom studies, which included learning Russian.

His environment would alter significantly as he moved through his teens, but some of the legacies of the hothouse education of the old DDR system are still detectable in his football, say his admirers and his critics.

East Germans are reckoned to be more two-footed, like Ballack is, by some coaches, because of a sound, formal training in the game when they were very young. But Ballack has also had throughout his career to listen to opinion-formers saying his background makes him ill- suited to captaincy. Gunther Netzer, one of West Germany’s greats from the 1970s, once remarked: “Ballack will never be a leader, he has too much of that sense of the collective that comes from the East.”

Ballack will, nonetheless, lead Germany to the World Cup next summer, 20 years after West Germany’s last triumph in the tournament. There may well be three or four other “Ossis” alongside him in the squad, though the nation is no longer counting the numbers as self-consciously as it did two decades ago.

What the anniversary of the Wall’s fall has reminded German football about is the poor representation of the old clubs of the east among the unified elite. The Bundesliga has no former Oberliga clubs in its first division.

“After the Wall came down, a lot of charlatans took advantage,” recalls Geyer, the last coach of the DDR XI, a little wistfully, “and in hindsight it was fallacy to think that everything the West brought into the East was going to help its football.”

ihawkey@thenational.ae