The Most Immaculate Haircut
Eisenhüttenstadter FC Stahl 0-6 (six) TuS 1896 Sachsenhausen
Sportanlagen Waldstrasse, Eisenhüttenstadt.
Brandenburg Liga
Saturday 11th April 2015
Attendance 115
"Sorry,
we only do bratwurst on a Friday night".
Not a
great start to the trip. Slippery bockwurst from a jar are the only food
option. I'll go hungry, thanks.
Things aren't great in Eisenhüttenstadt. The town’s best days are long gone and the football club can no longer match past DDR achievements.
Classic groundhopper shot.
*Sounds
Fact Klaxon* I'll keep the facts brief.
Eisenhüttenstadt
was East Germany's first pop at a town in a fully socialist planned style, a
commie Milton Keynes if you like, and originally called Stalinstadt. At
the time the Berlin Wall fell Eisenhüttenstadt was home to 50,000 people, a
huge steel works, and a team in the top level of East German football. Now,
half the population have buggered off, the steel works is mostly closed and the
team are struggling at the bottom of 6th level of German football. Still,
I bet the Commie's could manage to BBQ a Bratwurst on a Saturday.
Appears to have been coloured in with a permanent marker.
The main
stand is a cramped, crumbling and dusty socialist relic. Seats
are missing, leaving unwelcoming wooden benches. Those seats that remain are
filthy, or cracked; or filthy and cracked. The sweeping terraces are covered
in weeds and moss, the club house is closed, the scoreboard is
broken, the stadium signage has faded away to feint outlines and the
goal posts are rusting.
The road to nowhere. Not a road.
"Dear esteemed committee members, good news. We can afford to replace the dilapidated seats in the main stands."
"All of them, Hans?"
"Well......three of them?"
*mass booing ensues*
Double-denim
clad fans make their way to the ground along broad, deserted streets lined
by abandoned housing blocks bearing socialist murals. They’re greeted by a
sparse food offering and jaunty electro indie pop, which has recently been
introduced to Eisenhüttenstadt (or, if you prefer an English translation, Iron
Hut Town). Pre match tunes include "I Still Remember" by Bloc
Party (Blok Partie), "Everything Counts (Everyzink Counts) by Depeche Mode
and "Mr Brightside" (Herr Brightside) by The Killers (Die Killers Die).
Groundhopper classic curving terrace shot.
Pre match
warm-up for the home starting eleven consists of dribbling round
the daisies on the bobbly pitch before firing shots over the
corroding goal frame and into a sand less long-jump pit. Pre match warm-ups
for the home subs involves fetching wayward shots from a sand less long-jump
pit.
Fritz vowed never to go to the football again after his prized handkerchief turned up tied to the corner flag. Oh, the indignity.
Both teams consist of eleven men who don't look like footballers. Most of the play suggests many of them aren’t footballers. Eisenhüttenstadt’s number ten is an angry brick of a man who barges into anyone who comes near him whilst simultaneously struggling to control any ball that comes near him. He can’t shoot and generally has the demeanour of a hunger crazed German carnivore who's just asked for a large Bratwurst at a Morrisey concert.
"For me, Geoff, that's a straight red. He's gone in with both feet of the ground, with full force and he could do serious injury.
"Yes I agree, my question was about why the player on the right appears to be wearing striped shorts? No one likes to see that in football."
The home team are two down after twenty minutes, but they get a penalty
shortly after. This penalty could change the course of the match, revitalise
the clubs season and give rise to the re-awakening of the town. Carsten Hilgers
places the ball confidently on the white cross which marks the dry bit of earth
which marks what used to be the penalty spot. He steps up. He waddles it way
over the crossbar and straight over the sand-less long jump pit. After that
it’s all Sachsenhausen.
A home fan behind me provides a commentary which consists of “Oh man, oh
man, oh man, oh man…..” “Oh god, oh god, oh god….” Many other fans just laugh
at the ineptitude of both teams. Sachsenhausen are slightly less inept. At half
time they’re winning 4-0.
Sachsenhausen’s manager, Frank Schwager, is a man enjoying the afternoon
in the spring sunshine. Frank Schwager is also clearly a man who used to have a
mullet. He still maintains a little bit of it, just enough to tickle the collar
area.
The "F" stands for "Full of People"
He’s a man that knows that the heady days of peak mullet (1987 - 1991)
are, regrettably, gone, but his haircut reminds him of a rebellious youth he’s
unwilling to let go of. He’s in mullet rehab. Slowly reducing the length of a
mullet before a more contemporary haircut is slowly introduced is a tactic used
by many FMS (Former Mullet Syndrome) sufferers to help them reduce their dependency
on the short at the front, long at the back style and, very slowly,
rehabilitate them into normal hair styled society.
The treatment is going well, we are pleased with his progress but he's not fooling anyone by tucking his mini-mullet into his tracksuit.
Downtrodden areas, like East Germany, are prime FMS territory and,
statistically, football managers of lower league clubs are 37% more likely to
suffer than the rest of the population. Secret clubs congregate regularly in
dank church basements for slideshows of the photos from the heydays of the
mullet and to receive updates from the last bastions of mulleted resistance
against the square haircuts of the capitalist world.
Frank’s work in the second half consists solely of stroking his tenny-tiny
mullet and having the Bundesliga scores read to him by his assistant, a man
whose sole duty appears to be to read out football scores out from his mobile
phone to a boss who “hasn’t got his reading glasses on”. Glasses, or not, Frank sees his team score two
more goals in the first ten minutes of the second half before they declare. Eisenhüttenstadt,
its bratwurst starved people and its football team have suffered enough.
If you too suffer from FMS and would
like to speak to someone the AiT confidential hotline is open 24 hours. You do
not need to suffer alone.
