Henri Skiba

Henri Skiba (born July 14, 1927 in Beuthen OS as Heinrich Skiba ; † March 11, 2018 in Limoges ) was a footballer who made a name for himself as a player, especially in France . As a coach , he was responsible for several national league A clubs in Switzerland .

Player career

In his clubs

Heinrich Skiba, who was born in Upper Silesia in Germany at the time, played football for SuSV Beuthen 09 as a youth . At the end of the Second World War he was released from the Navy as a soldier in Deggendorf in Lower Bavaria , where he then - probably from 1946 - started for the local SpVgg, where he also worked in the boxing department ; professionally he worked as an office machine mechanic . There the red-blonde inner striker was noticed at the end of 1949 in a friendly against the old league eleven of 1. FC Nürnberg thanks to his enormous scoring threat and was promptly brought to the " Zabo " by the Franks . Due to conversion problems and in an overall "messed up season" for the club, however, he was only used in two Oberliga-Süd point games in the second half of the 1949/50 season .

Then Skiba moved further west and found a new employer in the French first division FC Nancy . There, too, he had initial difficulties to overcome and only made ten league games. In a series of attacks with Léon Deladerrière and Roger Piantoni , he did not succeed in proving his scoring danger; therefore he moved to the second division RCFC Besançon at the end of the season . In Franche-Comté he finally developed into a "persistent fighter, hard to the limit and technically not particularly gifted, but with an unconditional will to win" and finally also successful in the end, as the club magazine of his former Nürnberger reported in October 1952:

“The mayfly in the storm of 1. FCN, the Oberschlesier Skiba, seems to be on the other side of the Rhine. He has become a well-known goal scorer, in Besancon [sic!] He is expected to be a center-forward in the French national team. "

In France he was - clichéd - as a "tough, solid guy who got to know the horrors of the use of weapons and the forced marches during the war". And after his death, a player Skiba had coached said: “It didn't matter if it was hot or icy, he always appeared in shorts. ... [As a player] he should have gone with his head to the ball where others would not even have gone with their feet. "

In 1953, Henri Skiba returned to the top league, where he occupied the top of the attack alongside Roger Vandooren at AS Monaco, which had previously been more defensive . In his first season there, he finished eighth in the league hunter list with 14 goals . He was just as unable to win a championship title or a cup victory with the Monegasque as he did with his following club, RC Strasbourg , where he stormed under the coaches Oscar Heisserer and Henri Roessler together with Ernst Stojaspal and Lucien Muller from 1955 .

When the Alsatians had to relegate in 1957, Kader Firoud , the long-time instructor of Olympique Nîmes , brought him back to the south of France. Henri Skiba had his most successful time there, benefiting in particular from the interaction with two other goal-scoring strikers, namely Hassan Akesbi and Bernard Rahis : he was runner-up with Nîmes three times in a row, was in the 1958 cup final - at France's "over-team" of those years, Stade Reims , however, was no getting past -, shot his way to the top of the Division 1 scorer list twice (1958 rank 9 with 15, 1959 rank 6 with 19 hits) and, after he had taken French citizenship in 1958, made his debut in the A in 1959 - National team (see below). Nevertheless, Skiba moved after three years to the ambitious second division club FC Sochaux , with whom he also rose in 1961 and then played in Division 1 for a short time.

In the autumn of 1961, the 34-year-old moved to the capital club Stade Français . One of his goals for SF even went down in French league history as decisive for the championship, namely the 1-0 winning goal on the last match day of the 1961/62 season  - a "tragic goal" of all things against the table leader from Nîmes, his former club, who thereby still slipped to third place. After the game, he went to his former comrades in Nîmes' dressing room and apologized to their coach Firoud:

“Kader, what else could I have done? You know me well and you know that I can't cheat. I would have been so happy if you had become a master! "

Skiba's new team came despite a large number of offensive side people such as Raymond Bellot , Antoine Bonifaci , Philippe Gondet , Charly Loubet or Édouard Stachowitz ("Stako"), however, neither 1962 nor 1963 beyond a place in the middle of the table.

Therefore, he left France in 1963 after a total of 293 D1 games with 109 goals and then worked for the Swiss A national division FC La Chaux-de-Fonds , the first two seasons as a player -coach . There he finally won a national championship title in 1964 and also led his eleven into the cup final , in which opponents Lausanne-Sports, however, had the better end for themselves. So Skiba came back to international assignments late in his career. In September 1964, La Chaux-de-Fonds succeeded in "the surprise of the [first] round" of the European Cup , when the French-speaking Swiss beat AS Saint-Étienne 2-2 and 2-1 - on which "with Henri Skiba of all things a Frenchman had a big share ”, whose equalizer in the second leg won the match turned in favor of his team. The opponent of the following round, the later finalist Benfica Lisbon , was a size too big for the FCC, who were eliminated after 1: 1 and 0: 5.

In 1965, shortly before his 38th birthday, Henri Skiba ended his playing career.

Stations

• SuSV Beuthen 09 (as a youth)
• 1946 (?) - 1949: SpVgg Deggendorf
• 1949/50: 1. FC Nürnberg (2 league games / 0 goals)
• 1950/51: FC Nancy (10 D1 appearances / 0 hits)
• 1951–1953: Racing Besançon (in D2)
• 1953–1955: AS Monaco (47/18)
• 1955–1957: Racing Strasbourg (63/19)
• 1957–1960: Olympique Nîmes (104/47)
• 1960–1961: FC Sochaux (1960/61 in D2, 1961/62: 6/3)
• Nov. 1961–1963 at the latest: Stade Français Paris (63/22)
• 1963–1965: FC La Chaux-de-Fonds (as player-coach)

In the national team

In March 1959 national coach Albert Batteux appointed Henri Skiba against Belgium for the first time in the French national team . Against the competition of Just Fontaine , Raymond Kopa and his ex-storm partner from Nancy times, Roger Piantoni, he was unable to prevail in this circle. Therefore, when these three had to cancel due to injury, he was not even considered in the squad for the 1960 European Championship ; there were him Maryan Wisnieski , Michel Stievenard and Lucien Muller, a former teammate Skibas preferred again. He only wore the blue dress for two other international A matches in December 1961 (against Spain and Bulgaria ) and did not score a goal of his own.

Coaching career

After his two years as a player-coach, Henri Skiba coached FC La Chaux-de-Fonds for two more seasons, remained active in Switzerland during the following years , led Grasshopper Zurich (1967-1969) to runner-up in 1968, supervised 1970 for a few months the Young Boys Bern and from 1971 to 1973 FC Biel-Bienne , with whom he had to relegate to the National League B in 1972. He then settled back in France, where he - without countable success - coached two second division clubs : AS Angoulême (1973–1977) and FC Limoges (1978–1981).

At the same time, he set up a trout farm there in Moissannes in the Limousin , which still belonged to his family in the 2010s. Henri Skiba died in Limoges when he was 91 years old.

Stations

• 1963 to 1967: FC La Chaux-de-Fonds
• 1967 to 1969: Grasshopper Zurich
• 1970: Young Boys Bern
• 1971 to 1973: FC Biel-Bienne
• 1973 to 1977: AS Angoulême
• 1978 to 1981: Limoges FC

Palmarès

As a player

• French champion: Nothing, but runner-up in 1958, 1959, 1960
• Swiss champion: 1964
• French Cup: 1958 finalist
• Swiss Cup: finalist 1964

As a trainer

• Swiss runner-up: 1968

literature

• Denis Chaumier: Les Bleus. Tous les joueurs de l'équipe de France de 1904 à nos jours. Larousse, o. O. 2004, ISBN 2-03-505420-6
• Werner Skrentny (ed.): When Morlock still met the moonlight. The history of the Oberliga Süd 1945-1963. Klartext, Essen 1993, ISBN 3-88474-055-5

Web links

• Data sheet with photo on the website of the French Association

Remarks

1. ^ ^{A b} L'ancien entraîneur de l'ASA Henri Skiba est décédé. In: charentelibre.fr. March 27, 2018, accessed on July 11, 2018 (French). 
2. ↑ see the article "Heroes of that time" ( memento from March 1, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) on the SpVgg Grün-Weiss Deggendorf website , supplemented by the written notification of a footballer at the time to the main author of this article
3. ↑ according to the club magazine of 1. FC Nürnberg from December 1949, quoted at glubberer.de
4. ↑ Skrentny, p. 22
5. ↑ Skrentny, p. 211
6. ↑ Chaumier, pp. 280f.
7. ^ Quote from glubberer.de
8. ^ Louis Naville: Di Nallo - Gondet - Loubet - Revelli. Carré d'as du football. Solar, Paris 1970, p. 107
9. ↑ This and the following information on the top scorers in Division 1 according to Sophie Guillet / François Laforge: Le guide français et international du football éd. 2009. Vecchi, Paris 2008, ISBN 978-2-7328-9295-5 , pp. 150-162
10. ↑ A team photo of the cup final eleven can be found at football-retro.com  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .  
11. ↑ Chaumier, p. 280
12. ↑ See for example the website of Olympique Nîmes and the report on om4ever.com (there also a photo of this hit). How much Skiba Nîmes would have granted the title, France Football of May 20, 2014 in its article “May 20, 1962 - Reims pour dix-huit millièmes” (p. 64) emphasizes; from there the quotation but cornélien pour Skiba .
13. ^ Jean-Philippe Rethacker / Jacques Thibert: La fabuleuse histoire du football. Minerva, Genève 2003², ISBN 978-2-8307-0661-1 , p. 332
14. ↑ Numbers of his club-wise appearances and goals scored in Division 1 according to Stéphane Boisson / Raoul Vian: Il était une fois le Championnat de France de Football. Tous les joueurs de la première division de 1948/49 à 2003/04. Neofoot, Saint-Thibault o. J.
15. ^ Matthias Weinrich: The European Cup. 1955 to 1974. AGON, Kassel o. J. [2007], ISBN 978-3-89784-252-6 , p. 184
16. ↑ There is a 94-minute film of this international match at ina.fr
17. ↑ L'Équipe / Gérard Ejnès: La belle histoire. L'équipe de France de football. L'Équipe, Issy-les-Moulineaux 2004, ISBN 2-951-96053-0 , pp. 320-322
18. ↑ see Skibas data sheet at racingstub.com
19. ↑ Chaumier, p. 281
20. ↑ see, for example, this page of the French Ministry of Agriculture and this regional tourism page ( Memento of the original from November 13, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 6.8 MB) 
21. ^ Obituary for Henri Skiba from March 15, 2018 at midilibre.fr