Union have met Malmö FF before, it was just a long time ago.

In February 1975 the Swedish champions came to the GDR for three friendlies, against Carl-Zeiss Jena, FC Karl Marx Stadt, and against Union. According to the program that day, it was hoped only that Union would make a good show of things, that they’d show brotherliness and welcoming and warmth. It was written that they were representing not just the club and the city, and not just East German football either, but the whole damn republic.

More would have been largely impossible anyway. Union were stuck in the 2^nd division, caught between worlds, a supposed heavyweight down there, but a punching bag up top. A new coach had taken charge, Dieter Fietz, tasked with achieving the promotion they’d failed to secure for the last two years. He was only 32, he was inexperienced, a gamble.

As is so often the case with these things, it didn’t really work out.

Meanwhile the sporting authorities had grown tired of their mediocre showings on the world stage (despite being only six months on from their greatest propaganda victory, the 1-0 win in Hamburg against West Germany in the ’74 World Cup).Truthfully, many of them would have gladly given up on football altogether, it was too costly, too troublesome and the medals were few and far between. But they couldn't.

For the people liked it. 

So, in someone's wisdom it was decided that the problem with East German football lay not in tactics, nor in the lack of one of those golden generations of players few lands are ever granted by the will of the football Gods.

The fix was simple, tplayers weren’t fit enough. They weren’t tough enough.

Someone had looked at the performances of the GDR’s rowers and their runners and their swimmers and their throwers of heavy objects in competitions around the world, and decided that if hard work was good enough for them, then so be it for the footballers too.

This was, said through gritted teeth, “science-based” reform. It was barked out, grimly, in words that sent a chill through players across the land.

“Better performances through more training”.

Fietz was too young, too inexperienced, and possibly too cowed to contradict the dictat.

So the Unioner spent their evenings that winter running in eternal circles around the stadium grounds, and their mornings in the spring - beginning at 8am, often six days a week - running 10,000m through the Wuhlheide.

This was a miserable penetance. Through the rutted muddy paths they ran, over barbed wire like broken branches poking out when least expected, that scratched the legs and threatened to break the ankles.

Striker Achim Sigusch said in Jörn Luther and Frank Willmann's tome, "Eisern Union!", not unfairly, that this was madness. "Just because a few people thought it’s how things should be done.” If he swore, it is not recorded in print, though it is easily inferred.

Uwe Neuhaus would make his team do this occasionally, too. When they’d lost, when he needed to prove a point. When asked about this modern variant, Micha Parensen recently just shook his head and smiled ruefully, cast back to the hell of those runs.

But for those Unioner on the outside, maybe – just maybe - there was a hint of pleasure to be taken in this, an inherited miserable memory linking the eras and the stories of the club together.

Urs Fischer, however, is unlikely to do the same. He likes football training. It’s where he shines. His voice can be heard when his players train once a week on the stadium pitch, as he gives out instructions during small games, moving his defenders around like chess pieces, guiding them, schooling them, trying to pass on an inherent knowledge gained through hundreds of top flight games played as a centre-back.

One of his favourite phrases is “Schnell im kopf”. As in, you don’t have to be fast on the ground when you’re fast in the head. If you have to sprint, then you were already in the wrong place. Then, when it’s right, his angular Swiss vowels ring out over the empty terraces.

“Yes! That. Is. Football.”

Fischer, though, is at home as this is being written, pacing the floors, climbing the fucking walls, cursing the second line on his corona test – no matter how thin it may have been – that had stopped him training, stopped him flying out with his squad as they prepare to take on Malmö FF in 2022.

When Union played them in 1975, Malmö were on their way to yet another Swedish title. They starred Krister Kristensen, who had played more games than anyone in the Swedish top flight, and their forward line was still largely led by an ageing Bo Larsen, who had scored more goals there than anyone ever had before. He was a genuine world star and Malmo were on the long road to the 1979 European Cup final.

As an aside, this is where we find one of those curious little quirks of history that football throws up every now and again, holding the universe together like little bits of string. For this was also a Malmö side managed by Bobby Houghton, the Englishman who would take over the reins at FC Zurich just as Fischer was leaving the club of his birth for a four year exile in St. Gallen.

That their paths cross now in the slightest of ways, if only as a mere breath of recognition mouthed by strangers in a passing conversation, is somehow fitting too.

Malmö beat Union easily that Sunday afternoon, 3-0, despite the vague hopes expressed in the program that Union would play above their level. There were 8,000 people in the Alte Försterei and the advertising hoardings flogged the state lottery that would form the basis of Saturday night entertainment on prime time TV, and would continue until the end of the country itself.

It was a curiously warm day, 15 degrees. But the pitch was a boggy mess.

Sigusch played as part of a three up front, just beginning the second of his spells at Union. Wolfgang Juhrsch, in goal, however struggled to impart much solidity to his defence according to match reports the day after. They looked nervous, apparently, unsure of their footing, overawed by their international opponents.

And Fietz, barely older than many of his players, watched on from the bench, thinking of how he’d have to get them all running again the next day, around and around and around. Within six months Juhrsch would be pushed out by his coach. He said many years later he still never understood why, but maybe it was just because Fietz needed to assert himself in a manner, tried and tested by many better coaches than he would ever prove to be.

Conny Andersen and Tore Cervin scored early for Malmö. But the Sportecho was more excited about Bo Larsen’s penalty - dispatched with power and precision, giving Juhrsch no chance -  to make it 3-0. It added a touch of glitter to the afternoon.

Few talk of that game in 1975 now, of course. It remains a dot on the landscape, a dwindling, twinkling memory. And try as they might, the authorities could never replicate their victories in other sports by flogging the players through the forest. It could never last.

Sigusch recounted many years later that Union ultimately gave up on “better performances through training harder” anyway. They stopped the runs and just told the authorities they’d done them anyway, they just filed the reports to the necessary people, and that, it seemed, was enough.

And in that there is also something. Something Union. Because despite all our mythmaking and all our fairytales, they would still be at times like a recalcitrant schoolboy, kicking around at the back of the classroom, muttering to themselves, not doing what they were really supposed to be doing.