In September 1986, following the collision of two ships a few miles off the coast in the North Sea (leaving one, a medium sized passenger ferry, stranded on a sandbank) Pelé was left alone for what felt like the first time in decades. Few knew he was there at all and even they’d now disappeared. …
Category Archives: football
Oskar Kosche’s Job
Foto by Stefanie Fiebrig at textilvergehen You just call on me, brother, when you need a handWe all need somebody to lean on As his teammates wheeled away having secured the unlikeliest of victories, a goal that the Unioner will talk about for a generation, Andreas Luthe didn’t join in. He had been at fault …
Union Berlin’s past, and Union Berlin’s future
As I cycle along Wilheminenhofstrasse, the Indian summer’s sun on my back, the wind coming off the Spree across to the north, the first thing that hits me is the little things, the minutest of details that have changed on the iconic, industrial revolution era yellow brickwork of the Transformatorenwerk. There’s new tags painted up …
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Michel Platini’s Folly
When my kids ask me, as I hope they one day will, how best to strike a football, I will show them a goal Michel Platini scored against Sampdoria in Turin in about 1985. I’m not certain of the year, just because he always scored against Sampdoria. Juventus scored four goals in four games against …
Jimmy Hoge’s Best Story
There was a strangely sad, though beautiful and quite remarkable moment at the 1.FC Union members meeting back in 2009, when Jimmy Hoge received his golden needle. The highest honour the club can present. He was not a man often at a loss for words, but this time there was a choking in his throat …
Sebastian Andersson’s Goals
I interviewed Sebastian Andersson last year for Textilvergehen, only a day or two after the fire that started in a fridge in the main stand so catastrophically damaged the building. Workers ripped plasterboard unceremoniously off the walls with claw hammers as I waited. They pulled out mile after mile of wiring. It was a mess. …
Dexys Midnight Runners’ “Searching For the Young Soul Rebels.”
Kevin Rowland cut a weird figure walking around town. He must have lived nearby because he’d always be sat in the Chinese restaurant around the corner from my flat by the seaside. It was one of the nicer restaurants, and as such was often empty. Apart from him. He was the sharpest man everywhere he …
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Sebastian Polter’s Melody
Image courtesy of Stefanie Fiebrig at textilvergehen In 1969 Pharoah Sanders recorded a fifteen minute long track called “Hum Allah Hum Allah Hum Allah.” You might not know it. Many don’t, for it’s an impenetrable and challenging record. It’s difficult to listen to, especially for those who don’t know their late sixties, black consciousness, free …
Neven Subotic’s Caveat
When he was the figurehead of a peculiar revolutionary movement sweeping through Corinthians football club in the late 1970s, Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira, MD, used to invite other people, non-footballers, to come and talk with the squad on Fridays before a game. For Brazilian footballers were traditionally sequestered away in the …
Bahman Foroutan’s Speech
He didn’t wear a tie. He said they were for conservatives and if there was one thing he certainly wasn’t it was a conservative. A conservative wouldn’t have driven a crappy little car from Asia across Europe. Wouldn’t have revelled in the uprising of Paris in 1968. Wouldn’t have taken on the Iranian authorities when …
Jacob Sweetman 