Frank Espig

Frank Espig (born September 19, 1949 ) is a former German soccer player. For the company sports community (BSG) Wismut Aue , he played 143 games in the GDR Oberliga , the top division in GDR football . With the GDR junior national team , he completed five international matches.

Athletic career

As a junior player at Wismut Aue, Espig was part of the junior national team from 1967 to 1968 and played five international junior matches during this time. He was used as a defender. His first appearance for Wismut Aue in the GDR league was at the age of 20 on September 24, 1969 in the match on the 8th matchday between BSG Chemie Leipzig and BSG Wismut (3-0) as a substitute in the 68th minute. By the end of the 1969/70 season he made a total of seven league appearances, and was in the starting line-up twice. After he had played only one league game in September 1970 in the following season, he was drafted into the army for 18 months in November 1970. During this time he was able to continue playing football with the Vorwärts Löbau army sports community . He helped the team to rise to the second-rate GDR league , where he completed 17 of the 20 point games played in the 1971/72 season. After he was released from the army in May 1972, he returned to Wismut Aue.

There Espig was first used in the GDR league team Wismut Aue II. His return to the league team did not take place until the 1973/74 season. There he took over the position of Libero from the middle of the first half of the season , where he played until the end of his senior league career. Just as long he was also a regular in the bismuth league team and came from 1973 to 1979 within six seasons in which 156 point games were played, on 135 missions. In his last league season 1978/79 he played 25 of the 26 games. In the summer of 1979 Espig suffered a serious knee injury that forced him to quit his football career.

literature

• German sport echo : born 1967–1979. ISSN  0323-8628 .
• Hanns Leske : Encyclopedia of GDR football . Verlag Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-89533-556-3 , p. 128.
• Andreas Baingo, Michael Horn: The History of the GDR Oberliga. 2nd Edition. Verlag Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 3-89533-428-6 , p. 290.
• DFSF (Ed.): GDR Chronicle - GDR Football 1949–1991 (Volume 8). Berlin 2011.

Web links

• Frank Espig in the database of the German Football Association
• All games at bsg-wismut-aue.de