In the summer a friend of mine, Darren Norton
(@Knockernorton1), decided to set up a Fanzine to cover local non-league side
North Ferriby United who had just gained promotion to step 1 of the non-league
pyramid. The aims of the magazine are twofold; to stimulate interest in a
local club which has done wonders for its size, and to raise much needed
funds for local junior football.
View From The Allotment End @VFTAE was born in August and
will be publishing issue 3 in January 2017.
It has started small but so far has sold out and has also sold small
batches of merchandise (tee shirts and bobble hats). The magazine doesn’t concentrate solely on
North Ferriby United and because of this a few copies are posted across the
country. Details of how to get a copy
can be found on the Twitter feed.I will be a regular contributor to the magazine and my brief is connect football to the arts in general. The piece I wrote for issue 1 follows, I hope you enjoy and check out the magazine, we think its rather good.
East meets West
As a youngster growing up in the 1970’s your football fixes
were few compared to today’s 24/7 coverage.
Live football was almost non-existent; highlights on match of the day
was best but restricted to a few major teams rather than covering all matches
like today. There was always the radio
to fall back on though. Crackly radio 2
on medium wave was put up with because of the brilliant Peter Jones, especially
so for midweek European Cup matches. For
glamour we had Ajax and Bayern Munich but for mystique and the unknown we got a
glimpse behind the iron curtain.
One of the strangest instances of East clashing with West
happened in the 1974 World Cup in West Germany (the Federal Republic of
Germany) when the hosts played East Germany (German Democratic Republic – the
GDR) in the first group stage. The GDR
was formed in 1949 in the early days of the cold war when certain areas of the
Soviet Occupation Zone the control was passed to Soviet supported communist
administrations. West Germany refused to
accept the GDR as a sovereign state until 1972 and meetings between the two
were restricted Olympic Games trial matches.
The draw for the groups in itself was controversial. Chile should have played the Soviet Union in
a two-legged intercontinental playoff but the Soviets refused to play the
second leg in the Estadio Nacional which had been used a detention and torture
centre in the recent coup d’état, giving the tie to Chile. Then the groups were
seeded with previous World Cup Winners in one pot and the other three pots
being on a geographic basis. That kept
the GDR (who would follow the Soviet’s bidding) apart from Chile but allowed
for West Germany able to be drawn against the GDR, which following sods law
duly happened.
This was to cause headaches as just weeks before the
tournament the West’s Chancellor Willy Brandt had to resign after it was
discovered that one of his personal assistants was actually a spy for the East.
The game itself was played at the Volksparkstadion
in Hamburg on 22 June 1974 watched by a sell out crowd of 60,200. The West had already beaten Chile 1-0 and
Australia 3-0 but they were not reaching the levels which were expected of
them. Whereas, the East had beaten
Australia 2-0 and had drawn with Chile 1-1 and they were surpassing
expectations but for them the only match that mattered was the final group
one. The final group match for Chile and
Australia had already ended 0-0 which meant that both East and West had already
qualified for the second group stage.
The game itself wasn’t regarded as a classic, perhaps there
was too much at stake (from the East’s perspective), or perhaps there was too
little with qualification assured. Both sides
spurned easy chances in the six yard box before Gerd Müller
came closest to scoring hitting the post shortly before half-time. Then the unthinkable happened on 77 minutes when
a quick counter attack from the GDR found Hamann in space, intelligent running
from Lauck provided a decoy for a long pass to Sparwasser making his run from
deep midfield. The pass took an awkward
bounce and he appears to control it with his face rather than his chest but
this pushes him past a defender and allows him to lift the ball over the
sprawling goalkeeper Maier. The West
continued to press but they were wasteful and the East hung on for a dramatic
victory. After winning this one the
East made sure that the record would remain intact by avoiding the West until
re-unification.
Was there some kind of conspiracy? Well coming second in the group meant that the
West missed the Netherlands, who were blazing a trail, in the second phase. However the Netherlands final group game was
the following day (23rd) so the idea of throwing the game doesn’t
stand up, certainly not like the shameful events of ‘Disgrace of Gijón’ in the
1982 World Cup which led to final group games being played simultaneously.
The 1974 match features in a recently-released crime novel
by Cottingham-born Hull City supporter, David
Young. After trying a variety of
temporary jobs – including a short stint with his father’s builders’ merchants,
JR Young & Sons, on Clough Road, Hull – David ended up with a career in
journalism with local newspapers, a London news agency, and international radio
and TV newsrooms. His first book ‘Stasi
Child’ – the first of a series set in mid-1970s East Germany – was published in
paperback earlier this year and has been longlisted for the Theakstons Old
Peculier Crime Novel of the Year and the CWA Historical Dagger.
The book centres on East Berlin and follows a case
investigated by heroine Oberleutnant Karin Müller. When a child is discovered shot dead but
apparently running away from the Berlin Wall rather than trying to flee to the
West, Karin feels that there is more to it than
appears. Reading it you get a feel for a
life of oppression in East Berlin and the fear of Stasi and their many informants. David cleverly weaves the match into the plot
of the book but you will have to read it to see how he does it.
David, who is you
football allegiance with these days, Hull City or some southern softies?
Very much Hull City, even though I now live in Twickenham
and last lived full-time in Cottingham when I was nine. I’ve supported them
since the days of Chilton and Wagstaff, with occasional breaks when other
obsessions took over. As a boy I dreamed of City getting to the FA Cup final
but never really thought it would come true – then it did, and I was there! I
try to get to as many away games as I can and I’m a member of the Hull City
Southern Supporters, but find it too expensive and time consuming to go to home
games, so the Midlands is about my limit. Furthest trips this season were for
the dire league defeats at Preston and Derby, although the latter was atoned
for in that great play-off semi-final away leg. I wore my very rare 1981 Adidas
HCAFC shirt to Wembley. Allegedly it’s the one Keith Edwards threw at Mike
Smith in disgust when he was subbed in a 0-0 home draw against my now local
team, Brentford. The club were in dire financial trouble (plus ca change) and I offered to buy a season ticket if they sold
me the shirt Keith had thrown away. Whether it actually was his, I’ve no idea.
It’s a very tight fit!
Scandi-noir is a well
mined popular genre, what made you come up with a book in a style that may be
called Commie-grey?
The book does feature a section on the frozen Baltic coast
of East Germany, so maybe I ought to sneak it into the Scandi-noir piles in
bookshops! As a diversion from a day job I’d grown to hate (as a news editor
for BBC World TV) I started my own indiepop band at the end of the noughties,
and managed to blag a little tour of Germany. So the inspiration was seeing how
much of the GDR still survives in eastern Germany, and also reading the
wonderful Stasiland between gigs –
Anna Funder’s non-fiction stories of Stasi operatives and their victims. And,
cynically, I spotted a gap in the market!
How did the match
come into mind for the plot of this book?
I needed the officials at a GDR institution to be
sufficiently distracted by an event that they wouldn’t notice something else
happening. So really I just used it as a device. It was such a big thing for
East Germany, I imagined as many as possible would have been watching it on TV.
So the match features – but in a very tangential way.
What comes next for
you/Karin?
I’ve been lucky enough to secure a three-book deal with my
publishers Bonnier-Zaffre, and the second in the series – set in the East
German new town of Halle-Neustadt – is due out in February 2017. At the moment
I’ve just started writing Book 3. Football looms large in this one – with East
German team Stahl Eisenhüttenstadt (which loosely translates as ‘Steel
Ironworks City’!) central to the plot. A Manchester City-supporting friend has
insisted I get his team in too, and some Tigers’ fans want Hull City
references. So I can see I’ll have to shoehorn in a fictional 3-way friendly
tournament between the three ‘cities’. One thing there won’t be any mention of
is Hull Tigers … or ‘hooligans’ being told they can die when they want.
As they say, available from all good bookshops from February 2017....
