Football legend: Joachim Streich – what you can and want

He was one of the most important heroes of GDR football: Joachim Streich (1951–2022). His biggest international success was the bronze medal at the 1972 Olympics. In the game for 3rd place, the selection of Georg Buschner in front of 80,000 spectators in Munich in the final sprint had a 0-2 deficit against the Soviet Union Oleg Blochins. The match ended draw, the Sborjana and the GDR kickers had to share the precious metal. In the decisive group game of the intermediate round, the GDR had thrown host FRG with a 3: 2 high edge two days earlier, with the second goal against the class enemy. Back then kicked for Hansa Rostock, then for 1. FC Magdeburg. In GDR football, he broke all records and brought it to 102 caps with 55 goals.

Joachim Streich was born in Wismar in 1951, you already know, “Nosferatu – a symphony of horror” (1921), and much earlier Klaus Störtebeker. Then there was a prank. At 17, he made his debut in Hansa Rostock’s league team. The writer Peter Wawerzinek was born in Rostock in 1954. SC Empor Rostock was founded six weeks later, from which FC Hansa emerged from the end of 1965. Waxinek has been living in Magdeburg for several years. Yes, that’s how it is.

That is why the “Iconen” series supervised by the busy Frank Willmann at the Voland & Quist publisher of the narrow band “Streich, the Achim” appears. Don’t worry, they are not football books from fans for fans, and Wawerzinek does not write a biography here and throws with statistics. The game of life is never a football game, it is life itself. Peter Wawerzinek once again provides information about his childhood and youth in and in the north German homes. He describes the everyday competitions, test of courage et cetera among the children, surprises us that he even briefly did boxing training to extend the children’s home. Instead of Runkel (his real family name), he is scolded. He is forced to play football in the school time children’s home. “The trill whistle shrill continuously.” Finally, the adoption of a couple of teachers works. It is now called Wawerzinek. The neighboring children throw him “with names for dog food, call me Frolic, Pal, last but not last.”

Everyone wants something from him, the loner out of conviction, which, according to his own statement, lacks “the necessary ambition”. “I am lazy (…) I am one of the variety Joachim Streich who knows what he can do and also wants to show it.” I always thought that the prank was a nerd as a player and as a coach was a grinder. Well, many footballers were considered “lazy”, for example Günter Netzer or Mario Basler. As is well known, this did not detract from their genius in the pitch.

Wawerzinek’s pull-grandmother can generally not gain anything from sport. “Fencer practiced to punch each other, she says.” At her time she was a bit ahead of her time: At the fencing World Cup in Rome in Rome on July 19, the foil of the Tauberbischofsheimers Matthias Behr pierced the protective mask of his Ukrainian opponent, the blade broke and injured the most successful fencing and acting world champion Wladimir Smirnow in the head-days later he.

Wawerzinek swaddates about all the only conceivable sports, actual or spun, enough football is already being done. And finally he was a sailor, “pinnate, Pütt and vest under his arm”. And then he still runs the ball after Traktor Rerik (now SV Steilkäste Rerik), but he missed the “happy shantys” there. The mishap happens on his 18th birthday: he messes up the cup win for his team because he “balanced the leather pill from two and a half meters away five meters above the box”. Actually nothing honorable. Paul Breitner did it as a player of Eintracht Braunschweig against HSV. I was more touched as an eyewitness. Streich missed a 911 in his last game for Hansa (season 1974/75) two years after “Schappi”. In 1984 Lothar Matthäus followed. In his last game for Mönchengladbach before moving to Bavaria, he missed his penalty in the DFB Cup final-against his new employer. Bavaria won.

The title hero appears for the first time in half of the booklet. Rüdiger, whom Werzinek would rather call Jost, will be his bank neighbor in the EOS Bad Doberan. He knows everything about Joachim Streich, is a walking lexicon. He becomes a new grandma for Waxinek, leads him to word games. Both lift off in their cosmos. One is loner who prefers to watch “brooding swans”, the other outsider and nerd, a person without other interests. In the beginning he comes across as a “Loco Lindo”, as a likeable spinner, then the ambivalent, it gets nervous: “In the morning, at noon, in the evening, in the evening, he plays the ball with him. (…) The world is called Hansa and is a blue, beautiful, big football in the large vast cosmos.” Yes, that is also Mecklenburg. Dozens of stickers grow into the sky at every lantern of every cow ceaf, all power boxes in the federal state in the Hansa colors, only on the peaks of the wind farms have not yet dared.

In the credits of the book, the author visits his ex-buddy after decades. He is now doing self -catering. His garden is also an “encyclopedia”, a “co -composed masterpiece”. Perfection in the land garden is not possible. “Achim” Jost has not changed, caught in his own ego.

Peter Waxinek: Streich, The Achim. Voland & Quist, 88 pages, Br., 12 €.