Ove Eklund

Ove Eklund
Personnel
birthday	January 30, 1946
place of birth	Hallstahammar ,  Sweden
position	striker
Men's
Years	station	Games (goals) 1
0000-1967	Hallstahammars SK
1968-1971	Åtvidabergs FF	75 (42)
1971-1975	Royal Antwerp	87 (24)
1974-1975	→  Stade Reims  (loan)	5 0(0)
1975–	Åtvidabergs FF
National team
Years	selection	Games (goals)
1969-1973	Sweden	14 0(4)
1 Only league games are given.

Ove Eklund (born January 30, 1946 in Hallstahammar ) is a former Swedish football player . The striker won the title of Swedish top scorer in the 1968 season .

Career

Eklund started playing soccer in his hometown at Hallstahammars SK . Before the start of the 1968 season, he joined Åtvidabergs FF in the Allsvenskan . In his first season for the club, he was used in all 22 games of the season and led the team to seventh place in the table with 16 goals this season. He was crowned the only top scorer in the league , ahead of Harry Bild , who scored 14 goals, and 13-time goalscorer Inge Ejderstedt , the storm duo of master Östers IF .

Eklund was honored for this success the following year. On June 25, 1969 he came under national coach Orvar Bergmark in the international match against Denmark for his debut in the national jersey . With his goal in the 60th minute of play, he shot the Swedish national team to a 1-0 victory. Although he managed the decisive goal in the 1-0 away win in the Soviet selection in the following international match, he was still unable to establish himself in the regular formation of the national team. Although he was one of the top ten league shooters in the 1969 season and was still running for the national team in March, Bergmark preferred Ove Kindvall , Ove Grahn , Örjan Persson , Tom Turesson and Inge Ejderstedt as offensive forces for the 1970 World Cup final tournament . In the autumn of 1970 Eklund, who was only outbid in the Allsvenskan scorers list by Bo Larsson from Malmö FF and Jan Sjöström from Hammarby IF and had won the national cup with the club in the summer , returned to the national team and distinguished himself here until the following Summer as a goalscorer.

In the summer of 1971 Eklund, who had scored seven goals for Åtvidabergs FF in eleven games by the middle of the season and repeated the cup victory, left his home country and moved to the Belgian First Division at Royal Antwerp . In his league debut on August 1 of that year, he distinguished himself as a double scorer. By the end of the season, alongside players such as René Desaeyere , Louis Pilot , Louis van Gaal and Flemming Lund, he scored eleven goals this season. In the following season he was one of the club's best internal shooters with nine goals, but could not assert himself in the national team under Bergmark's successor Georg Ericson and played his last of 14 international matches in the spring of 1973. At the side of Roger Van Gool and Karl Kodat , he was runner-up with the team in 1974 behind RSC Anderlecht .

At the beginning of the 1974/75 season Eklund was still used for the Belgian club, but was loaned to Stade Reims in December 1974 . There he was supposed to replace striker Carlos Bianchi , who had already scored a dozen goals in ten league games by October, before he suffered a triple broken leg. However, the Swede was only able to fill this role to a limited extent: from December 15 he only made five Division 1 missions, with no scoring. As a result, the Rémois storm leader was called Bianchi again from March 20, 1975, and Eklund returned to Sweden that summer. There he went again for Åtvidabergs FF on the hunt for goals. At the end of the 1976 season he rose with the club in the second division.

Web links

• Ove Eklund in the database of weltfussball.de
• Ove Eklund in the rafcmuseum.be database

Remarks

1. ↑ Information on the time at Stade Reims from Pascal Grégoire-Boutreau / Tony Verbicaro: Stade de Reims - une histoire sans fin. Cahiers intempestifs, Saint-Étienne 2001 ISBN 2-911698-21-5 , pp. 161 and 316ff.