Werner Liebrich

Werner Liebrich
Personnel
birthday	January 18, 1927
place of birth	Kaiserslautern ,  German Empire
date of death	March 20, 1995
Place of death	Kaiserslautern,  Germany
position	Defense
Juniors
Years	station
1938–194?	1. FC Kaiserslautern
Men's
Years	station	Games (goals) 1
1945–1962	1. FC Kaiserslautern	355 (28)
National team
Years	selection	Games (goals)
1951-1956	Germany	16 (0)
Stations as a trainer
Years	station
1965	1. FC Kaiserslautern
1971-19 ??	1. FC Kaiserslautern Am.
1 Only league games are given.

Werner Liebrich (born January 18, 1927 in Kaiserslautern ; † March 20, 1995 ibid) was a German soccer player , coach and soccer world champion from 1954. With 336 league appearances, the stopper is the record player of 1. FC Kaiserslautern in soccer in the former World Cup system -Oberliga Southwest .

Football career

Playing career in the club until 1962

His hometown club was 1. FC Kaiserslautern , for which he was active as a youth from 1938. For the first time in the war round 1943/44 he ran in the 1st team from Kaiserslautern, which was included in the Gauliga Westmark . In 1951 and 1953 he became German champions with the FCK . After the end of the Second World War , the Liebrich brothers Ernst and Werner, goal scorer Werner Baßler and defender Werner Kohlmeyer were among the first men around whom the national player Fritz Walter, who returned from captivity on October 28, 1945, built a new team as player-coach . From the first round in 1945/46 Werner belonged to the regular cast of the later "Walter-Elf". During these years, “ Grumberry games ” against clubs in the country against coveted natural products such as potatoes, cabbage, tobacco and coal were also part of the regular program. With the team around playmaker Fritz Walter, the younger Liebrich brother was in the first final of the German soccer championship on August 8, 1948 in Cologne . With his four-year-old brother Ernst and Heinz Klee , he formed the runners-up of the Walter-Elf in the then usual World Cup system in the 1: 2 defeat against 1. FC Nürnberg . In the following year, 1948/49 , he won the game for third place with 2-1 goals against Kickers Offenbach in the final with the FCK. In the final round in 1949/50 Liebrich and colleagues failed in the intermediate round at the later German champions VfB Stuttgart . After the successes in 1951 and 1953, he was also a member of the Lauterer teams, which lost the final against Hannover 96 and Rot-Weiss Essen in 1954 and 1955, respectively . From 1948 to 1958, the stopper and middle runner completed 44 games (1 goal) for FCK in the final round of the German championship. From 1948 to 1957, he celebrated nine championships with Kaiserslautern in what was then the first-class Southwest football league , only interrupted in 1952 by 1. FC Saarbrücken. Statistically, 336 league appearances with 28 goals from 1945 to 1962 are recorded for the organizer of the Lauterer Defensive with a strong header.

He had his last national appearance with FCK as a 34-year-old senior in the DFB Cup in 1960/61 . He led the new FCK through successes against Heider SV (2: 0), Tasmania 1900 Berlin (2: 1 n.V.) and in the semifinals with a 2: 1 away win at Hamborn 07 in the final. This took place on September 13, 1961, on a Wednesday evening under floodlights, in the Schalke Glückauf-Kampfbahn against SV Werder Bremen . Werder, trained by Georg Knöpfle and led in midfield by conductor Willi Schröder , won the game with 2-0 goals.

In the Oberliga Südwest, his last league assignment for FCK dated March 25, 1962 in a 2-0 away defeat at FK Pirmasens . Kaiserslautern took fourth place and the last still active world champion had played another 20 league appearances (1 goal). His actually last competitive game he completed on July 1, 1962 during the Inter-Toto round in the second leg against the Hungarian team of SC Tatabánya . Then he ended his active playing career.

The strengths of the defensive conductor from Lauter were his discipline, considered play, passes into the free space and powerful headers. If the FCK threatened a defeat, he gave the signal to catch up with his advances. He interpreted his role as a “stopper” more than his predecessors. Perhaps one can say that it was something of a predecessor of the later “Libero”. In combat, his specialty was the almost perfect sideways rattle into the opponent.

National team, 1951 to 1956

He played 16 games for Germany from 1951 to 1956 as a middle runner . In addition to Fritz and Ottmar Walter , Werner Kohlmeyer and Horst Eckel , Liebrich was one of the five players in 1. FCK who created the miracle of Bern in 1954 and became world champions in Switzerland with the German national soccer team , see also Germany at the 1954 World Cup in Switzerland .

The Lauterer stopper did not belong to the DFB-Elf, which reopened the international game history after the end of the Second World War on November 22, 1950 in Stuttgart with a 1-0 win. His debut took place on June 17, 1951 in Berlin during the international match against Turkey. He played center runner in the 1: 2 home defeat and was assisted by the two outside runners Jupp Posipal and Hans Haferkamp . In the following years , national coach Sepp Herberger relied on Posipal from Hamburg as head of defense and Liebrich only got two more international appointments before the 1954 World Cup tournament in Switzerland: on October 5, 1952 in Paris against France (1: 3) and on May 28, 1952 March 1954 in Saarbrücken in the World Cup qualifier against Saarland (3: 1).

During the World Cup in Switzerland, the Lauterer stopper was in impressive shape. Already in the quarter-final match in Geneva against Yugoslavia he showed an outstanding performance. In the 2-0 success against the plavi long- term offensive with their internationally respected attackers Miloš Milutinović , Rajko Mitić , Stjepan Bobek , Bernard Vukas and Branko Zebec , national coach Herberger praised him as a "rock of defense". He grew from game to game with his tasks and was one of the best in the final. It was not only because of his strong header game that he was “solid as a rock.” After the final, he was voted the “stopper of the tournament” by sports journalists.

The duel scene of Liebrich in the group match on June 20 in Basel at 3: 8 defeat against World Cup favorites Hungary by Ferenc Puskás then hurt until the final round fails, Fritz Walter describes in his book 3: 2 by saying: "Werner slides into a dribble from Puskas. With his upper body he knocks down the Hungarian, who has the bad luck of falling with his full body weight on his ankle when he falls. Liebrich has Puskas, this must be expressly stated, not through an illegal one Hit or injured by a deliberate kick. It goes without saying that he regrets the consequences of his hard bump more than anyone else. " Horst Eckel says about the duel: "Fritz and Werner came in (into the locker room after the 3-8 defeat). Werner accidentally fouled Puskas so that he had to leave the field, so the two were in after the game gone to the Hungarian cabin to apologize. "

In the book The History of the National Football Team , on the other hand, a clearly negative statement from the magazine Die Welt is recorded on Liebrich's foul: "Without need, he took revenge on Puskas. He simply took revenge for the fact that this great player was the better man. This Liebrich you should never play for a national team again. " In later years there were friendly encounters between the former competitors of the 1954 World Cup; Among other things, a class reunion of all five Hungarian and eight German survivors from Bern took place in Baden-Baden in June 1994.

Liebrich delivered an outstanding performance like in Switzerland on December 1, 1954 in London at Wembley Stadium, which was filled with 100,000 spectators, in a 3-1 defeat against England. He not only stopped on the side of the host center forward Ronnie Allen , but also constantly helped Kohlmeyer, who was overtaxed on the left defensive position against Stanley Matthews . National coach Herberger then paid tribute to his performance with the words: "Werner, the English pennant belongs to you." His 16th international match against Switzerland on November 21, 1956 in Frankfurt was his last appearance in the national team. Not only because of the 1: 3 defeat it was a low point for the DFB-Elf. When the defending champion started in Sweden in 1958, the World Cup stopper from 1954 was no longer part of the squad; Herbert Erhardt from Fürth now took his place.

Trainer

From February 1965 to the end of the 1964/65 season he trained as an interim coach at 1. FC Kaiserslautern and took 13th place in the Bundesliga with him . After the 3-1 home defeat against Borussia Dortmund on February 20, 1965, Liebrich took over from the former head coach Günter Brocker as coach of the Betzenbergelf with players such as Gerd Schneider , Helmut Kapitulski , Willy Reitgaßl and Winfried Richter . On the last round match day, FCK secured relegation with a 2-1 away win at Eintracht Frankfurt. For the 1965/66 season, he handed the Bundesliga eleven to his successor Gyula Lóránt . In 1971 he took over the training management for the FCK amateurs.

Life

Liebrich came from a working-class family and his father Ernst Karl was a plasterer and a communist persecuted by the Nazis. He had been in custody since October 28, 1933 and was sentenced to one year and ten months in prison. The judgments against the brothers Ernst Karl and Alois Liebrich were overturned in 1949 and 1950. After their father was arrested, the two sons Ernst and Werner lived with their mother in extreme poverty and were dependent on the help of relatives and friends. Worse still, they were treated like "outlaws". The Liebrichs are the only FCK family in which, with father Liebrich, a club member can demonstrably be attributed to the political resistance against the Nazi dictatorship.

Werner Liebrich was ordered to work on the fortification of the Siegfried Line in 1944/45; his older brother Ernst joined the Navy in 1942/43. After the end of the Second World War, Werner was a civil servant post office worker until 1956 and later ran a Toto Lotto acceptance point on Eisenbahnstrasse in Kaiserslautern. If he sometimes acted as a hot spur on the field , he is also attributed the character trait of a pronounced sense of justice, with which he was able to drive national coach Herberger to white heat himself. He had a dry, sarcasm-prone sense of humor.

Liebrich, who was called "Driver" or "Der Rote" (Palatine: "de Rod"), died on March 20, 1995 after a heart operation. Ten years after his death, a street in the FCK youth center on the Fröhnerhof was named after him.

Others

In the feature film The Miracle of Bern , Liebrich is portrayed by Andreas Bath.

literature

• Dominic Bold: 1. FC Kaiserslautern. The Chronicle. Verlag Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-7307-0046-4 .
• Lorenz Knieriem, Hardy Grüne : Player Lexicon 1890 - 1963 . In: Encyclopedia of German League Football . tape 8 . AGON, Kassel 2006, ISBN 3-89784-148-7 .
• Michael Garthe, Hans-Peter Schössler (ed.): The myth of Bern. And his football world champions from the Palatinate. Rheinpfalz Verlag, 2004, ISBN 3-937752-00-5 .
• Jürgen Bitter : Germany's national soccer player: the lexicon . SVB Sportverlag, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-328-00749-0 .
• Christian Jessen, Volker Stahl, Erik Eggers, Johann-Günther Schlüper: Football World Cup 1954 Switzerland. The miracle of Bern. (= AGON World Cup history volume 5). Agon Sportverlag, Kassel 2003, ISBN 3-89784-218-1 .

Web links

• Werner Liebrich in the database of weltfussball.de
• Werner Liebrich - The forgotten anti-hero - Article in the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung
• Heroes of Bern
• Werner Liebrich in the database of National-Football-Teams.com (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Under the skin. Issue 48, p. 14.
2. ^ Jürgen Bitter: Germany's national soccer player. The encyclopedia. Pp. 284-285.
3. ^ Matthias Arnhold: Werner Liebrich - International Appearances . RSSSF.com . March 5, 2020. Accessed March 6, 2020.
4. ↑ Eckel, Neumann: The 84th Minute . Agon Sportverlag, Kassel 2004, ISBN 3-89784-253-X , p. 89.
5. ^ Jessen, Stahl, Eggers, Schlüper: Football World Cup 1954 Switzerland . The miracle of Bern, p. 89.
6. ^ Fritz Walter: 3: 2. The World Cup games. Copress-Verlag, Munich 1954, p. 68.
7. ↑ Horst Eckel: The 84th minute . Agon Sportverlag, Kassel 2004, ISBN 3-89784-253-X , p. 79.
8. ↑ Dietrich Schulze-Marmeling (ed.): The history of the national soccer team . Verlag Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-89533-578-5 , pp. 129/130.
9. ↑ Rudi Michel (ed.): Fritz Walter. The legend of German football. Engelhorn Verlag, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-87203-216-X , p. 138.
10. ↑ Hardy Green, Lorenz Knieriem: Encyclopedia of German League Football. Volume 8: Player Lexicon 1890–1963. P. 233.
11. ↑ Markwart Herzog: The 'Betze' under the swastika. 1. FC Kaiserslautern in the time of National Socialism. Verlag Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-89533-541-9 , p. 230/231.
12. ↑ ^{a b} Rohrbacher List: In the heart of the Palatinate. P. 358.
13. ↑ imdb.de The miracle of Bern in the German IMDb.