Take-off

There was fog in the air as the players stepped out of the Alte Försterei on Wednesday morning, thinking about the Johan Cruijff Arena. It was fitting, somehow, for a step out into history. Sheraldo Becker, who spent the best part of a decade at Ajax before making his way out to den Haag, and then on to now, to Union, later would describe how this was the stuff of dreams. It was the point of being a footballer all along.

“Everyone knows Ajax,” he said, and how right he was. The name of the stadium is somehow enough.

After the press conference two Dutch journalists were asking whether this was the biggest game in Union’s history. They were told by the Unioner present; possibly, maybe, but also probably not. It’s hard to say, and how does one judge the Cup finals of ’68, of 2001, or even of ’86 anyway? Or Osnabrück, or Karl-Marx-Stadt?

Looking around the Cruijff Arena, the pictures on the walls of European Cups won are next to one of a crying youth player, a little kid, the scolding words of his trainer ringing in his ears. They take football seriously here, winning is a hard habit to break out of. One question was,

“What happens then if you lose tomorrow?”

The scents of cleaning fluid and glory were both in the air. The words of Becker putting things in their place ringing around the echoey room. It didn’t matter what was bigger. What mattered is that Union were here, said Becker, and they too had only one thing on their minds.

The past

The myth of the FDGB Pokal (the East German cup) win in ’68 is plump with meaning, the birth of legends and a thousand stories told in a thousand boozers, redolent of a new club with everything before them, the story improved by knowing that it was somehow always doomed to fail anyway. Then, reaching the 2001 DFB Pokal final had seen them come back from the brink, a third division side punching up, with the weight on their shoulders of the birth of a new nation that needed to be shown that some things were worth looking after in the rush.

The 1986 FDGB final is the forgotten one, particularly amongst the newer generation. It’s the ugly duckling final, despite the astonishing semi where Union had beaten a superb Dynamo Dresden over two legs, 5-4, but were steamrollered by Lokomotive Leipzig 5-1 in the second half at the Stadion der Weltjugend, a stadium that exists only now as the sprinklings of concrete dust in the foundations of the new headquarters of the German secret service.

But it had capped a superb period, Union came seventh in the top flight that year, then they had played international - as they say around here – even in West Germany against Uerdingen, in the InterToto cup. Ralf Sträßer and Olaf “Leo” Seier lead the line with wit and panache and a tonne of goals, as well as a certain knack of finding each other like siblings in the dark.

It was a final flourish, however. The next year Union went back to flirting with relegation. The year after that they faced it full in the face and were only rescued by the impossible ending provided by the miracle of Karl-Marx-Stadt when they rescued their place in the Oberliga with the last kick of the game. “Leo” was all over that match, of course. But Union could only look on enviously at what could have been.

Lok reached the final of the Cup Winners Cup in ’87, their entry secured by the drubbing of Union. There are still people who claim that there were 120,000 people in the Zentralstadion to watch them beat Bordeaux in the semi-final, though even in the greatest pub-mythology this seems a bit over the top.

But they did lose to Ajax in the final. It was Johan Cruijff’s first European title as a coach.

The Netherlands

Instead, that Summer Union embarked on another adventure; one remembered by far fewer people, and one that had only really been enabled by a certain relaxation of the rules on travelling by the men in control of East German football. Usually when in need of international experience they played Pogon Szcecin (Gerald Karpa, club historian notes that they played them 23 times between 1970 and 1988).

Now they travelled to the Netherlands, to what was euphemistically called the NSW - the Non-socialist-business-sector - to play a series of games against FC Excelsior Rotterdam, FC Wageningen, Telstar Velsen, Helmond Sports and FC Den Haag.

Telstar are now in the 2nd division. Wageningen were dissolved in 1992. Helmond were once famous for having garages instead of stands and for the time that Cruijff passed a penalty to Jesper Olsen instead of shooting at goal (the Dane rolled it back and Cruijff scored).

But Danilho Doekhi would start playing at Excelsior a decade later, as Becker would flourish at Den Haag few years after that.

According to Karpa, the trip seems to have been bound up with the usual intrigue and chaos. There was the involvement of an unnamed Dutch contact who had friends in high places and a superb fish supper that had Lutz Hendel astonished at the variety on view. There was the silence of the Unioner who were neither allowed to travel to the tour, nor were particularly well informed about its outcomes, and the operations of a Stasi officer who doubled up as the match reporter for the Deutsches Sportecho.

Neither Sträßer nor his partner Seier were there. Sträßer had left Union already, delegated across the country to Jena, unhappily for most involved. He spoke movingly on his return to Union only a few weeks ago after the best part of two decades away, about his potential, but how he’d been forced to leave BFC in the first place, the best club in the land at the time, when almost certain of European competition.

His sister had asked to leave the country and that was enough. Seier simply wasn’t allowed to travel to the Netherlands, saying years later that he wasn’t deemed trustworthy enough.

Weirdly, both of them were present when Union had played Bayer Uerdingen in the InterToto the previous year. Maybe Seier had just rubbed someone up the wrong way.

But then sometimes, things just didn’t go as they should have been expected to in a land often bogged down by impossible contradictions, and capable of acts of improbable cruelty.

It’s not much to go on. Karpa compiled all the stories he could, but the players’ minds are largely blank. It remains now as only another one of those myths passed along through the history of a club who would take a generation to return to the Netherlands.

The landing

On Wednesday morning - as the players flew over the rectangular chessboard tiles of brown and green that proved as a signpost for having completed crossing over the border into the Netherlands - and as they arrived for training at the impossible concrete-walled fortress of the Cruijff Arena, they knew nothing of any of this, of course. Why would they, they had their boyhood dreams on their minds.

Sheraldo spoke eloquently, as ever, mostly in English, though most of the questions came from Dutch journalists wanting to talk about Ajax. This was what it was all about, he said; this was the justification for all the work, all that he had given away. His family would be here on Thursday he said.

They were Ajax fans, but only until tomorrow. He smiled at that. So did the Unioner.

The records state that Union drew their game in Den Haag in 1987 in the end, Hendel scoring the equaliser. And that, it would seem was that. But not entirely.

For it does remain, in the files of Karpa, as in the mind of a young Den Haag fan who had seen Union that day, who then travelled, implausibly, to East Berlin for the return leg the following month. Bart made friends easily and was immediately infected by Union.

“I caught the virus” he says today. He also says that it was 2-1 to den Haag and he’s still got the ticket. It cost 8F- He was in Rotterdam to see Union when they came back to the Netherlands last year, as he’ll be there in the Johan Cruijff Arena on Thursday night to play, well, what is probably, possibly, maybe one of the most important games of their history, to watch Danilho and to watch Sheraldo. And to allow himself the chance to dream of what would have happened the night that Lokomotive Leipzig lost to Ajax, had they just not won the cup final the year before.

Not that it matters, any of it. They’re here now.