Gerhard Harpers

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Gerhard Harpers (born March 12, 1928 in Bochum ; † May 27, 2016 in Dortmund ) was a German football player and coach .

Biographical

"Gerdi" Harpers was born as one of six children to a family of miners ; At the age of six he joined SuS Gerthe in his hometown. Nothing is known about his career during the war years ; but it can be assumed that his father was indispensable as a miner and therefore did not have to go to the front. He himself completed an apprenticeship as a lathe operator and played at VfL Bochum as a teenager .

Club career

In 1947, SV Sodingen , a club from Herne in the immediate vicinity of his home town of Gerthe , and an almost pure operating team from the Mont Cenis mine , signed the dangerous left runner . In 1950 Harpers rose to the second division with his green and whites, and in 1952 further up in the Oberliga West . As early as 1953, he had attracted such attention that he played his first international match (see below ); In addition, in the summer of this year he received offers to move to Wacker Innsbruck or Sampdoria Genua . Harpers, a very down-to-earth person, preferred to stay in the Ruhr area instead of succumbing to the lure of the much better earning opportunities, especially in Italy . With Sawitzki , Adamik , Nowak , Konopczynski and Cieslarczyk he had teammates who also made it possible to achieve higher sporting goals in Sodingen.

With the Sodinger “ Knappenmannschaft ”, about which Sepp Herberger said because of its uncompromising kick-and-rush style and the unconditional commitment of all players that it was “the only German team that plays English” , Harpers achieved second place in 1954/55 in the Oberliga and the subsequent participation in the final round of the German Championship . He was on the pitch in the qualifying game against SSV Reutlingen as well as in the six group games (against 1. FC Kaiserslautern , Hamburger SV and BFC Viktoria 1889 ), where he also scored a goal against Berlin.

The highlight of this round was the encounter against the Lauterer, who competed with all their " Bernese World Champions " on May 22, 1955; Due to the expected rush of visitors, the home game had been moved to the Schalke Glückauf-Kampfbahn , where chaos arose hours before the start of the game because around 80,000 people crowded into the stadium, which only had 40,000 seats. At kick-off, around 55,000 of them had found admission, who - although the game had to be interrupted several times because the spectators were meters on the field - saw a highly dramatic game with a rather unfortunate outcome for Harpers' men (2: 2). In the end it wasn't enough to make it into the final, but Sodingen was a respectable third party with 7: 5 points behind 1. FCK (9: 3) and HSV (8: 4) and the name of the suburban club was well beyond the Ruhr area also become a household name.

In 1956, Gerhard Harpers left his home country and joined Fortuna Düsseldorf , which had given him a job in a brewery. He was not really happy with the Rhinelanders, was also plagued by injuries and ended his career as a contract player in 1959 after a broken fibula. Another season followed at his very first club in Gerthe. In total, Harpers has played 154 league games and scored 36 goals, including 125/29 for Sodingen and 29/7 for Düsseldorf.

In 2009, Gerhard Harpers could still be found in the audience seats at amateur games by the Gerthe game association in his home town of Gerthe.

The national player

Gerhard Harpers played six A internationals between March 1953 (0-0 against Austria ) and November 1955 (2-0 against Norway ) and was in the B national team four times between November 1952 and May 1956 ; the opponents were twice Switzerland, England and Spain. A hot candidate for the 1954 World Cup , the national coach deleted him from the German squad at the last minute and replaced him with Ulli Biesinger . In any case, the reasons for this were not primarily to be found in “Gerdi's” performance on the lawn; Rather, there is some evidence that the fun-loving and sometimes cheeky outrunner did not necessarily correspond to the ideas of discipline that Sepp Herberger attached great importance to. Harpers himself later added that “the workers' club and its players had no lobby at the DFB” . However, in December 1954 he was back in the senior team, which lost 3-1 to England at Wembley Stadium , and was then used against Portugal and in 1955 against Italy , the Soviet Union and Norway (see above).

The trainer

Full - time employed in the Castrop-Rauxel social welfare office from 1959 , he trained several amateur clubs in the following years, where he was able to achieve regional successes in particular with Arminia Ickern and Hellweg Lütgendortmund . In the seasons 1978/79 and (temporarily) 1979/80 he was the coach of his old club, SV Sodingen. On the side he played in numerous celebrity teams before he had to stop these activities in the late 1980s for health reasons.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Gerhard Harpers died at the age of 88, WAZ on May 30, 2016
  2. a b Lorenz Knieriem, Hardy Grüne : Spiellexikon 1890 - 1963 . In: Encyclopedia of German League Football . tape 8 . AGON, Kassel 2006, ISBN 3-89784-148-7 , p. 133 .
  3. Baroth, p. 81
  4. Piorr, Volume 1, pp. 155f., And Volume 2, pp. 204f.
  5. Mydlák, p 95
  6. similarly also Baroth, p. 82
  7. Mydlák, p 93