Football – Cottbus against Dresden: Playing in the sums of the police helicopter

Perhaps you have to start with a story about the top game of the third division. People who are closer to FC Bayern or Liverpool FC than the FC Erzgebirge Aue could otherwise sit down false ideas. So: the season is a professional league, full of bumped with stumbling traditional clubs, the fans of which of course have risen. 11,500 spectators look at the games on average. Four clubs – Dynamo Dresden, Alemannia Aachen, Hansa Rostock and Arminia Bielefeld – welcome more than 20,000 curious per game.

Energie Cottbus, first of all six seasons between 2000 and 2009, reported “Sold out” on Saturday – after all, it was against Dynamo Dresden. And thus around one of many rather unironic rivalries in this division. In both fan camps you could see a lot of dark -looking man’s people who run into the gym several times not only for aesthetic reasons. Three hours before and after kick-off, the permanent amount of police helicopters was over the city. And if you find that there is often far too much police on site at football games, you have to admit that a fan separation with anti-aggression teams and supervision would not have worked. So it remained peaceful and the Cottbus coach Claus-Dieter Wollitz was able to pronounce a “giant compliment to both fan camps”, “that the focus was on the game.”

Anything else would have been a shame on this Saturday afternoon, because if you don’t have fun on such 90 minutes, you are really better off in front of the TV on a Champions League Wednesday. In this league with structurally built -in competition, in which the youngsters of Borussia Dortmund and VfB Stuttgart have the most valuable squad, the comparatively wealthy Dresden and the clammy hosts fought a great game. This was mainly due to Cottbus, which played in attack mode for over 90 minutes in accordance with his image, mostly ball-safe and continuously briskly, a level problem definitely did not have this game.

Anyone who thought that the permanent runners had to go out after an hour’s breath saw themselves deceived. After this hour, Stefan Kutschke shot the undeserved Dresden lead. And it continued cheerfully. In the end, it almost had a Cottbus victory if Timmy Thiele’s header ended up a few centimeters under the crossbar in added time. But already his goal for 1-1 in the 86th minute had dramaturgical and acoustically equally high potential: after the game, Cottbusser reported citizens who live far from one and a half kilometers away that they had heard clearly.

It is all the more astonishing how quickly the adrenaline mining with the two trainers was. Thomas Stamm, the Dresden coach, correctly emphasized that he had to be “more than satisfied with the point”. The Swiss coach did not try the mitigating circumstances – with Vinko Sapina and the eleven -time goal scorer Christoph Daferner, and instead oraked that “one point could still be very valuable”. That is true, after all, Cottbus and Dresden lie in first and two of the table after the 21st matchday and would therefore rise directly into the second division, the 1. FC Saarbrücken is third.

The likelihood that the second division will soon be richer by two other traditional clubs is high. And if it were again a team that was only briefly in the third division, that would not be a sensation. Anyone who saw how skillfully Cottbus attacked on Saturday and at no time forgot the balance to a defense work can well imagine the second division. It would be even more amazing that energy played in the fourth -class regional league Northeast last season if you had not got used to the fact that teams only need a year to get from the fourth to the second division. Last summer, SSV Ulm and Prussia Münster rose two clubs that had kicked against Steinbach Haiger and Rödinghausen the previous year.

However, the man, whom one is most likely connected to Energie Cottbus, will then accompany an ascent with mixed feelings. Wollitz ends in the summer of 2025 as a coach of the club and then becomes a sports director. He has been a coach in Lusatia a total of three times over several years, and since 2022 he has also been working as a sporting manager for energy. From June, Wollitz, who will have worked as an energy trainer for over 4000 days, wants to limit itself to managing. He has already rounded the club icon Ede Geyer, under which Cottbus rose to the Bundesliga for the first time.