Borussia Mönchengladbach against Real Madrid 1976: My first time

When I was nine I got to know great football. He was about six feet tall, a man, and blocked my view. On this cold afternoon of March 3, 1976, Borussia Mönchengladbach and Real Madrid met in the European Cup, what a great number. It was the first time in my life that I was in such a big football stadium and I didn’t see anything.

Borussia Mönchengladbach is a club that has lived many years in the past. After all, Borussia’s biggest successes were around 40 years ago, and a great many of their fans have aged since this moment and the club’s ups and downs that followed. I am one of them.

In the evening, Borussia will play against Real in the Champions League again, but that is proof that the club is doing better than it has been in a long time. And as if a higher power also had a black and green heart, the club was assigned to two teams from the group stage, Inter Milan and Real Madrid, which are an inseparable part of the club’s biography. No matter how much you defend yourself from this nostalgic transfiguration and many outside of Mönchengladbach from the Netzer-Wimmer-Heynckes-Weisweiler years with hair flying from the depths of the room, so little can you escape this fall 2020.

With East Westphalia coach

With the match against Inter Milan a week ago, the rifle shot at Roberto Boninsegna was marked, in 1971 he was still too young to properly appreciate the drama about the coca can in Bökelberg. Five years later, however, he was already a small fan of success. With the only fault: until now I only knew Borussia from the sports show and the WDR2 conference with Kurt Brumme. But this Wednesday night, a coach drove from East Westphalia to the Rhineland and Düsseldorf, where Borussia played their European matches at home. On board: my father and me.

My first football game, the only son on the bus among the men, the only son later in the spectator block. And my father was so tired of lifting his son in the stands at the start of the game that he had to use his resources elsewhere during the game. He finally needed his arms to cheer: Henning Jensen, the team’s second underrated Dane alongside little Allan Simonson, scored 1-0 in just two minutes. I didn’t notice anything from this door either, surrounded by all the big, exulting men around me, but I still remember a clear line of sight to the marker opening for me. And one of the images I can remember from football to this day is the view from below between the men jumping onto the gigantic scoreboard at the Rheinstadion in Düsseldorf, in which it lights up: 2-0 Wittkamp (minute 27).

Gladbach’s 2-0 lead over Real Madrid, as sensational then as it would be today. Real Madrid, what club, then the president was the Santiago Bernabéu, people today only know it as a stadium. Real with the Pirri monument as captain, with the rogue Benito and Camacho in defense, with Vicente Del Bosque in midfield, with Paul Breitner – and of course with Günter Netzer. Who should have belonged to the other shirt. He had turned his back on Borussia three years earlier after winning the cup. And now this Günter Netzer wore the blue-black outfit of the people of Madrid. Good thing that, thanks to the 1.90 men around me, I didn’t have to see him.

Real turned the game into a draw

However, I had to see how the entries on the scoreboard changed over the course of the game: Roberto Martínez and Pirri led Real to the final score of 2: 2. Still: a draw against Real Madrid in the European Cup, no so bad for a first soccer game. The local alternative would have been 1. FC Paderborn against SVA Gütersloh or SC Herford in the Verbandsliga West. Nothing against 1. FC Paderborn, but local heroes Alois Fortkord and Michael Vanderfeesten of those days weren’t a real choice compared to Jupp Heynckes and Rainer Bonhof.

At night I returned to the bus, the apple grain circulated around me, I have no idea how compulsory schooling was regulated at that time, in any case it was not vacations, in case of doubt I was missing the next day with a weak excuse that a subsequent apology is hereby delivered to the Ministry of Culture of North Rhine-Westphalia.

During the second leg in Madrid, two weeks later, before an incredible 120,000 spectators, the mantle of charity will be spread here. As the Gauls always emphasize with Asterix: “I don’t know any Alesia” because there they had a historic defeat against the Romans, the Gladbach variant is called: “I don’t know any Leonardus van der Kroft”. The Dutch referee, who denied Borussia two regular goals in the second leg when the score was 1: 1 and was never again allowed to divorce internationally, was, so to speak, the live rifle shot of this duel. Gladbach left, and I learned for life: one of the reasons football takes so many people emotionally is because it is so unfair.