Adolf Bechtold

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Adolf Bechtold (born February 20, 1926 in Frankfurt am Main ; † September 8, 2012 there ) was a German football player who played as a defender exclusively for Eintracht Frankfurt . With 373 games and two goals, he is the Eintracht record player in what was then the first-class soccer league south .

Career

Gauliga and Oberliga Süd, 1942 to 1960

The trained toolmaker played in the youth from 1938 to 1942 and in the first team from 1942 to 1960 and played a total of 711 games. On December 27, 1942, Bechtold made his debut at the age of 16 in the first team in the Gauliga Hessen-Nassau . His greatest success was the German championship in 1959 , and he was also the South German champion with his club in 1953 and 1959.

After the end of World War II he played with Eintracht from the first season 1945/46 up to and including 1959/60 15 rounds in the Oberliga Süd. The man from the Wetterau was reliability in person. The defensive player ended the 1945/46 season under coach Emil Melcher on June 23, 1946 with a 9-0 away win at Karlsruher FV. He played on the position of right-back in the World Cup system then practiced and Eintracht took eleventh place. In his second league year, 1946/47, he was now a regular player with 25 league appearances, occupied the Elf vom Riederwald with the coaches Melcher and Willi Treml , as well as the top performers Toni Turek , Heinz Baas , Heinrich Gärtner , Erwin Schädler , Albert Wirsching, Edmund Adamkiewicz , Ludwig Kolb, Willi Kraus and Adolf Schmidt took third place. With Kolb he mostly formed the defender couple. But this high-altitude flight did not last.

Under coach Walter Hollstein, Bechtold lived through the battle for relegation in the 1949/50 season; this of all things in the 50th anniversary of Eintracht. Bechtold and colleagues opened the round on September 4, 1949 with a 1: 5 away defeat at SV Waldhof Mannheim. At the end of the round, the Eagle Bearers landed in 14th place and had lost the last eight games in a row. Around 1950/51, Kurt Windmann, a new man took over the coaching post. In the next few laps there was a steady advance in the table. The team around Eintracht captain Bechtold - he played all 34 league games - finished eighth in the new coach's first year and had made a trip abroad to Spain over the Christmas period with games against Atletico Madrid and Sevilla FC. The climax took place immediately after the end of the season between May 2 and June 3, 1951 with a trip to America. On the trip to the USA, organized by the German-American Football Association (DAFB), the men around captain Bechtold played eight games between May 6th and 30th.

In the 1952/53 season, Bechtold won the southern German championship with Eintracht. Frankfurt prevailed with one point ahead of defending champion VfB Stuttgart; Bechtold had played all 30 games in the Oberliga Süd. The final round was followed by six games against 1. FC Kaiserslautern, 1. FC Köln and Holstein Kiel. The Betzenberg-Elf around the brothers Walter prevailed in the group games - on May 17th in front of 68,000 spectators in the Waldstadion with 1-0 against Eintracht - and also won the German championship in the final against VfB Stuttgart. The Eintracht defensive consisted mostly of goalkeeper Helmut Henig , the defender couple Bechtold and Ernst Kudraß , and the runner row with Kurt Krömmelbein , Hans Wloka and Werner Heilig . In the following season 1953/54 it was enough for the Hessians with the newcomers Richard Kreß , Alfons Remlein and Hans Weilbächer for the runner-up in the south. With 24: 6 points and 38:12 goals they had topped the first round table. The 1954 finals were played in a shortened form because of the upcoming World Cup in Switzerland. Bechtold and his teammates lost both games against 1. FC Kaiserslautern and 1. FC Köln.

For the 1956/57 season Adolf Patek took over - the Viennese had won the 1955/56 championship with Karlsruher SC - as coach at Eintracht Frankfurt for two years. After the first half of the 1957/58 season, the Patek-Elf were in second place in the table with 22: 8 points and had only conceded 14 goals in 15 games under the leadership of the new defense chief Ivica Horvat . On the last match day of the 1957/58 series, on April 13, 1958, Frankfurt gambled away with a 0-1 defeat at SSV Jahn Regensburg, who had already been relegated, to make it back to the finals. In Jahn-Elf, supervised by coach Béla Sárosi , Eintracht had acted in the defensive formation with goalkeeper Loy, defenders Bechtold and Höfer, and the runner row with Schymik, Horvat and Weilbächer. In both seasons, the defender, who was appointed honorary captain in 1956, was still a member of the team.

This only changed from the 1958/59 season, when under Patek's successor Paul Oßwald with Friedel Lutz and Hermann Höfer as the defender pair and Ivica Horvat as the middle runner, the central axis acted on the defensive and the championship win with 49:11 points and the goal difference of 71:25 succeeded. In the league season, Bechtold only made six appearances - against SpVgg Fürth, VfB Stuttgart, FSV Frankfurt, 1. FC Nürnberg, SSV Reutlingen and for the last time on January 11, 1959 in a 2-2 home game against Kickers Offenbach - and succeeded in the final Eintracht winning the German championship against local rivals Kickers Offenbach without a game by the honorary captain. In his last season in the Oberliga Süd, 1959/60, the Eintracht legend came again to eleven missions and the Riederwald-Elf achieved third place behind master Karlsruher SC and the runner-up from Offenbach despite the additional burden from the games in the European Cup of the national champions . The honorary captain played the last league game on March 6, 1960 in the 3-0 away defeat at Bayern Munich. As three days before, on March 3rd in the European Cup in a 2-1 home win against Wiener SC, he had played the central role on the defensive as a middle runner.

The 34-year-old actually played his last competitive game on June 11, 1960 in a 4-2 win in the South German Cup against the Bornheimers from FSV Frankfurt. Again he was active as a center runner and center forward Erwin Stein scored three goals.

European Cup, 1960

In the 1959/60 European Cup , Frankfurt reached the final against Real Madrid, who had already won four times in a row . The defending champion won the final in Glasgow with 7-3 goals. Bechtold, then no longer a regular player and not on the pitch in the final, only played the game on March 3, 1960 against Wiener SC in this European Cup season. In the 2-1 home win, he acted as a middle runner and formed the defensive together with goalkeeper Egon Loy , the defenders Friedel Lutz and Hermann Höfer , and the two outside runners Eberhard Schymik and Dieter Stinka . It was his only international competitive game because he never became a national player .

Bechtold was an honorary member and honorary captain of Eintracht Frankfurt. He died in his hometown after a short, serious illness.

successes

  • German champion 1959
  • South German champion 1953, 1959
  • German floodlight cup winner 1957
  • Hessen Cup winner 1946

literature

  • Ulrich Matheja: Schlappekicker and sky striker. The story of Eintracht Frankfurt. Publishing house Die Werkstatt. Göttingen 2004. ISBN 3-89533-427-8 .
  • Matthias Kropp (ed.): Germany's great football teams, part 7: Eintracht Frankfurt . Agon-Sportverlag, Kassel 1995, ISBN 3-928562-53-3 (Agon sport statistics; 14).
  • Matthias Kropp: Triumphs in the European Cup. All games of the German clubs since 1955 (= "Agon-Sportverlag statistics." Volume 20). Agon-Sportverlag, Kassel 1996, ISBN 3-928562-75-4 .
  • Werner Skrentny (Ed.): When Morlock still met the moonlight. The history of the Oberliga Süd 1945–1963. Klartext-Verlag, Essen 1993, ISBN 3-88474-055-5 .
  • Hardy Grüne , Lorenz Knieriem: Encyclopedia of German League Football. Volume 8: Player Lexicon 1890–1963. Agon-Sportverlag, Kassel 2006, ISBN 3-89784-148-7 .
  • Werner Raupp: Toni Turek - "football god". A biography. Hildesheim: Arete Verlag, Hildesheim 2019 (= 1st, reviewed edition) ( ISBN 978-3-96423-008-9 ), pp. 52–58 and ö.

Web link

Individual evidence

  1. Eintracht Frankfurt mourns the loss of Adolf Bechtold ( memento from November 1, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), message on the Eintracht Frankfurt homepage from September 10, 2012 (accessed on September 10, 2012).