Sunday 3rd June 2012 ko 11.00

Kriesliga A Essen Sud-Ost

SV PREUSSEN EIBERG 1 (Tüker 75)

SuS NIEDERBONSFELD 1 (Angerstein 42)

Att 67 (h/c)

Entry FREE

No Programme

Coffee €1

With it being Lee’s stag weekend, its fair to say we’d had more than a few beers on Saturday night. In fact, at breakfast one of our number had a receipt from the hotel bar with 2.20am on it. Yet for all of that, we weren’t stupidly hungover, just a little bleary-eyed; perhaps that’s due to Germany’s strict beer purity rules, no nasty chemicals here!

We took a train 35 km west to Essen, a city based on the Ruhr industries of coal and steel. I was a little surprised therefore that when we left the train at Essen-Eiberg station, the scene was one of leafy suburbia! Still not everywhere has to be a post-industrial hell-hole does it? It was a pleasant enough stroll to the Bezirkssportanlage Oststadt, or to be more accurate it would have been bad it not been hammering down with rain! Worse still Lee had looked up the ground on Google Maps and reported that there didn’t seem to be any cover. Brave faces were in evidence as we walked past the clay reserve pitch and into the main complex.

And from that point things looked up. There was a buzz about the place with beer being sold, and sausages were being grilled. For some reason I discovered that there was strong coffee being sold in the clubhouse! Better still, we discovered that there was cover in the form of two railway shelters, perched above a terrace with seats bolted on. We immediately made a bee-line for one and reserved our seats, rather reminiscent of the cliché about Germans and sun-loungers!

At pitchside there’s a shale running track between the terrace and the pitch. It seemed all rather municipal when compared to the club’s building efforts behind. But we had a decent vantage point, the game was on and we were dry!

It wasn’t the easiest game to watch. Maybe I was more hung over than I thought, but this was a game that for long periods failed to spark (maybe it was the rain!). Neiderbonsfeld were clearly that better side, but failed to capitalise on their possession, and will have been disappointed to have reached half time with only Jonas Angerstein’s effort to show for their efforts. They were made to pay when substitute Sebastian Tüker tucked away a well-taken equaliser, and in all honesty I thought that would be the final score at that point.

Of course I was right, but only after a fashion. I made the mistake of commenting how well referee Adam Schneider had done, when Niederbonsfeld forward Özay Gökesil went down in installments in the box, and to the crowd’s consternation Schneider gave a last-minute penalty. Up stepped Angerstein, and his shot went wide of the left post, to give justice for a poor decision, but not in terms of the visitors’ possession and general superiority.