José Maria Antunes

José Maria Antunes Juniór (born July 27, 1913 in Coimbra , Portugal , † March 12, 1991 ibid) was a Portuguese football player and coach. As a player, he won the first cup competition in Portugal in 1939 with the Académica de Coimbra . As national coach, he has earned a reputation as an innovator and served three terms in office between 1958 and 1969. His main occupation was a doctor and his services in the field of pulmonary medicine are still recognized today.

Live and act

Beginnings - student and player in Coimbra

The 1939 Cup

José Maria Antunes was born in Coimbra, northern Portugal, in the middle-class Sobral da Ceira district, the son of a military doctor. Two years later the father was ordered to go to Africa by the military and took the son with him on the trip. After a decade they returned to Portugal and settled in Lisbon, where Antunes was enrolled in the Colégio Vasco da Gama, now the Colégio Sagrado Coração de Maria. There the boy was also engaged in swimming, fencing, horse riding and rugby . Between the ages of 14 and 19 he also competed in athletics at the venerable Ginásio Clube Português . He then studied medicine first in Porto and soon after in Coimbra. He was happy to cultivate his image as a son from a good family, a menino da boa casa and strolled through the streets of the city in a white linen suit with his silver-studded cane, or let himself be admired in his red English sports convertible.

This also included his participation in the development of rugby at the university sports club from 1936, a sport that he was to follow with interest throughout his life. The team played their first game the following year. But it took until 1942 when the first victory could be booked against a team from Lisbon. The team led by captain José Maria Antunes won 8-0.

On February 10, 1935, he made his debut for the football team of the Académica de Coimbra, which had existed since 1911, in a game for the still unofficial Portuguese league championship against Académica de Porto . Coimbra lost 3-2 and was last at the end of the season, as in the following year - but relegation was not planned. From the beginning of 1938 Antunes, who always started with a handkerchief wrapped around his head, was the captain of the team. The highlight of his time with Académica was winning the Portuguese Cup when it was first played with a 4-2 final win in Lisbon against SL Benfica in May 1939, which was also the first title in the club's history. Overall, Antunes, who was primarily used as a right-back defender, played 119 games for the club until he left for work at the age of 29 on March 7, 1943.

In 1942 he married his wife Mercedes, with whom he was to have a daughter. In the same year he also found a job in the sanatorium of Caramulo , an institution primarily concerned with tuberculosis , which was once still rampant , almost 50 kilometers northeast of Coimbra. There he specialized in pulmonology and worked for six years under the capacity of Dr. Manuel Tapia.

In the meantime, he made his first coaching experience, when in the 1946/47 season at Académica the Hungarian Sándor Peics (also Alexandre P ~, et al.) Succeeded until the end of the season. Académica finished the season eleventh in the fourteen league.

In 1949 he moved to the capital, Lisbon, where he ran a private practice. In 1956 he was appointed director of a pulmonary hospital, the Sanatório do Barro near Torres Vedras , about 50 kilometers north of Lisbon. He would keep this position for the next 35 years. Under him, the institute should acquire a good reputation and be visited by the highest circles from home and abroad. He retained his interest in sports here, and athletes from local clubs were given regular examinations free of charge.

Stages as national coach

His next coaching engagement was with the Portuguese national soccer team . Back then, that was still a largely part-time job. There he made a name for himself for the professionalization and rationalization of processes and player selection. Historically, this coincided with the arrival of coaches such as the Hungarian Béla Guttmann and the Brazilian Oto Glória in Portugal, who also carried out modernizations at the club level. It was also up to Antunes to carry out a generational upheaval. Top players like Manuel Vasques and José Travassos  - both from the cinco violinos ("five violins") of Sporting - were over 30 and beyond their zenith. Players like Mário Torres , José Augusto and Hilário de Oliveira took their place under Antunes and also helped to raise clubs like SL Benfica and Sporting to the highest European level.

His first game was Portugal's last in qualifying for the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, which was already out of reach. In the San Siro stadium in Milan, Portugal lost 3-0 to Italy on December 22, 1957, making Portugal third and last of the group behind Italy and the qualified Northern Irish. In the games for the European Championship, Portugal was already much better positioned and only failed in the quarter-finals against the later finalists Yugoslavs with 2: 1 and 1: 5. The latter game on May 22, 1960 was his last time as a national coach. First Armando Ferreira and then, for two games, the former star striker of Sporting Fernando Peyroteo , in whose first game Eusébio made his debut, led the national team through the unsuccessful qualification for the 1962 World Cup in Chile, in which England were the main rivals.

On November 7, 1962 Antunes was back in Portugal's coaching bench, but lost the first qualifying game for the 1964 European Championship in Sofia with 1: 3 - Portugal retaliated five weeks later with exactly the reverse result. Hernâni from FC Porto scored twice here, while captain Mário Coluna from European Cup winner Benfica made the final score. In January 1963, therefore, a play-off took place in the Olympic Stadium in Rome, in which the Bulgarian footballer of the century Georgi Asparukhov distinguished himself with his decisive goal to make it 1-0 for the Eastern Europeans in the 86th minute against the Portuguese, who had seven Benfica players. Eusébio would have been the eighth Benfiquista but was out due to an injury. In April, Portugal defeated the world champions Brazil, who played with Pelé but without Garrincha , in a friendly 1-0 in Lisbon .

In mid-1964 he led Portugal through the games of the Taça das Nações , the Nations Cup held in Brazil, which was held to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Brazilian Federation . Portugal lost to Argentina and Brazil - again only with Pelé and without Garrincha - but held a 1-1 draw against England and finished with the same point and goal balance - 2: 7 - as the British together with these third in the event with four participants .

At the club SC União Torreense from Torres Vedras, which was promoted to the first division for the second time in 1964 , he replaced the Hungarian coach János Zorgo after the third match day and became team boss, or manager, while the Hungarian was his assistant coach. But that didn't help the team either and they got down without having won an away point.

After the team returned from Brazil, the Portuguese coaching bench was filled with team manager Manuel da Luz Afonso and coach Oto Glória . These led Portugal to the 1966 World Cup, where the team that went down in history as Magriços took third place. However, it is widely recognized that José Maria Antunes made a significant contribution to laying the foundations for this success.

From 1967, José Gomes da Silva led the national team through qualifying for the 1968 European Championship, but failed because of Bulgaria. On June 30, 1968 Antunes returned to the national team bench. His official title was now Team Manager . On that day he was defeated in Lourenço Marques, today's Maputo , the capital of Mozambique , which was officially a Portuguese province at the time , in a friendly game on the occasion of the opening of the Estádio Salazar, known these days as Estádio da Machava , against Brazil with 0-2. His main task of leading the 1966 so glorious team to the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, he could not fulfill. Portugal was only fourth in the qualifying group and thus last behind Romania, Greece and Switzerland. A 1-0 defeat by England in a friendly at Wembley Stadium in London on December 10, 1969 was the scenario for his departure from big football. He has often been accused of saying goodbye to the players of the golden generation of clubs Benfica and Sporting unnecessarily early. Portugal should not qualify again until the 1986 World Cup.

In 1993, the Torres Vedras Hospital, which specializes in pulmonary medicine, was named after it. In 2001 it was combined with the district hospital of Torres Vedras to form the Centro Hospitalar de Torres Vedras, but retained its own identity. In 2012 it is threatened with closure due to the financial crisis in Portugal. In Torres Vedras, a street named after him and a monument with a bust in Rua Princessa Benedita also commemorate him. A sports hall - the Pavilhão José Maria Antunes Junior - in which the home games of the first division roller hockey team and the second division basketball team of Fisica Torres Vedras take place, is named after him in Torres Vedras. As a doctor, he kept his practice, most recently in the Praça de Londres in the center of Lisbon. In 1979 he founded the local Rotary club of Torres Vedras, which he also served as president for the first two years.

In old age he settled back in his hometown Coimbra. On March 12, 1991, Zé Barrote , as he was known by his friends, died unexpectedly at Coimbra train station, on his way home from a gathering of rugby friends.

Web links

• António Ferreira Nunes: O Dr. José Maria Antunes Júnior eo Rotary Clube De Torres Vedras , Rotary Club de Torres Vedras, October 13, 2010.
• José Maria Antunes Veteranos da Associação Académica de Coimbra (as of November 14, 2012).
• Manager of the national team José Maria Antunes , European Football: national team matches 1872-2012 database (as of November 14, 2012).

Notes and individual references

1. ↑ "Rugby is a rowdy sport that is practiced by gentlemen and football is a gentlemanly sport that is practiced by bullies", people like to say in various circles in England and its former colonies. S. z. B. David Bradbury: Some of the spectators are as bad as on-field thugs , The Punch, September 24, 2012.
2. ↑ Historial Secção de Rugby ( Memento of the original from January 20, 2012 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. , Associação Académica de Coimbra (as of November 15, 2012).  
3. ↑ Here José Maria Antunes is shown on a photo of the cup winning team in 1939. He is fourth from the left behind - with a handkerchief around his head: Taça de Portugal 1939 , Casa da Academica em Lisboa, 23 May 2012.
4. ↑ Equipa Técnica , Académica de Coimbra (by November 14, 2012).
5. ↑ Brazil was never defeated when Pelé and Garrincha competed together. → Paulo Cezar Filho: Jornalheiros: A Seleção nunca perdeu com Pelé e Garrincha juntos , Jornalheiros, June 29, 2011.
6. ↑ Época 1964/65: Primeira Divisão , Arquivos da Bola, October 8, 2007.
7. ↑ As revoluções do "Zé Barrote" ( Memento of the original from April 3, 2012 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. , Federação Portuguesa de Futebol (as of November 14, 2012).  
8. ↑ 1968 - Inauguração com um Portugal-Brasil (0-2) , Clube Ferroviário Maputo , May 22, 2006.
9. ↑ Busto do Doutor José Maria Antunes Júnior , iGoGo - Guia de Turismo e Lazer de Portugal (as of November 15, 2012).
10. ↑ Associação de Educação Física e Desportiva (Torres Vedras / as of November 15, 2012).
11. ↑ José Maria Antunes Júnior - Lisboa , Nosso Portugal (as of November 15, 2012)
12. ↑ Barrote means "girder" or "supporting beam". Zé is a short form of the name "Hans". It is stated that he was called Ze Barrote “because of his stature” “and because of his powerful shot that could tear a hole in a wall” → Nela Curado: Figuras de Coimbra - Dr. Gonçalves Isabelinha , Cavalo Selvagem, November 3, 2008.