Big stages for small clubs. The DFB Cup throws Germany’s amateur clubs into the spotlight. Village teams can face German champions; ambitious Regionalliga sides can go head-to-head with Champions League participants. There have been plenty of cup upsets and shocks in the over 70-year history of the competitions. The cup has its own rules and its own history. Over the next two weeks, DFB.de will preview all 18 amateur clubs who are featuring in the first round of the 73rd DFB Cup. Today it’s TuS Erndtebrück from the Regionalliga West.
Quite cool – that’s how Laurenz Wassinger comes across. He’s ice cold like a goal scorer should be. Nerves? Hardly a trace. Nevertheless the duel against SV Darmstadt in the first round of the DFB Cup by no means leaves the 24-year-old cold. “We were all really looking forward to getting a Bundesliga side,” says Laurenz Wassinger thinking back to the moment of the draw. Promoted Regionalliga side against promoted Bundesliga side – this is one of the appealing match-ups that this competition has drawn up from the 64 first-round teams.
Tickets have been on sale since Saturday for the game which will open the 2015/16 DFB Cup on Friday, 7th August. The game between the team from Siegen-Wittgenstein and Darmstadt will be shown live on TV from 19:00 CEST, which means that the game will not take place at the team’s home 3000-capacity Pulverwaldstadion because it not suitable for a live TV broadcast. The game will instead be played 30 kilometres away from the village of 7200 souls at the Leimbachstadion of Sportfreude Siegen. 10,000 people will fill this stadium, with 4150 tickets being allocated Darmstadt. “I think it could be full. We are prepared for anything in any case,” says Dirk Beitzel, head of Erndtebrück’s football division, on the biggest game in the club’s 120 year history.
"The anticipation is unbelievably big"
TuS Erndtebrück achieved promotion to the Regionalliga West in June as champions of the Oberliga Westfalen. On the first weekend in august, a few days before the Cup game, the adventure for Erndtebrück begins at Borussia Mönchengladbach’s U23s, last season’s champions. “The anticipation is unbelievably big,” says Erndtebrück’s manager Florian Schnorrenberg, also head of sport at the Blue-Whites. “I hope we can take this euphoria into the DFB Cup game,” says the 38-year-old, who is in charge of the small but keen club for the third season.
The club has had a superb history in the last 20 years. In 1994 it achieved promotion to the Landesliga Westfalen 2, six years later it made the jump to the Verbandsliga (renamed Nordrheinwestfalenliga in 2011), and since then has finished fourth, fifth and now first in the Oberliga Westfalen. The man behind the success is Jörg Schorge, the chairman of the Erndtebrücker Eisenwerke (Erndtebrück steelworks). The company produces steel tubing and his around 2500 employees around the world, with over 500 in Erndtebrück. And many of them support TuS.
Holger Klose, in charge of the second team in the Westfalenliga, got to the heart of the matter after the championship win by saying, “just imagine: our village is in the Regionalliga. Hard to believe.” Erndtebrück sealed their sensational promotion on the last day of the season against FC Gütersloh and so secured the final spot in the DFB Cup proper for the first time. Only three days later, just hours after winning the district cup, they were drawn with Bundesliga side Darmstadt – and the town went wild.
"Darmstadt 98 is an awesome draw"
“Darmstadt 98 is an awesome draw,” says the coach as he shows respect to the higher quality opponent. “What Dirk Schuster’s team has achieved is amazing.” The same could be said for his own team. In order to be competitive in a higher league, Schnorrenberg has strengthened his promoted squad with new players experienced in the Regionalliga, including Robin Schmidt from Bonner SC, Tim Treude from Rot-Weiß Essen or Sven Engelke from 1. FC Köln II, with Luigi Campagna coming from Italian fourth-division side USD San Severo.
With the right mix, the underdogs are hoping to be able to cause some surprises in the Regionalliga. Secretly, they are also hoping for a large coup against the ‘Lilies’. “There will be no need for motivation from my side. The boys are raring to go; they all want to play against Darmstadt,” says Schnorrenberg.
Big stages for small clubs. The DFB Cup throws Germany’s amateur clubs into the spotlight. Village teams can face German champions; ambitious Regionalliga sides can go head-to-head with Champions League participants. There have been plenty of cup upsets and shocks in the over 70-year history of the competitions. The cup has its own rules and its own history. Over the next two weeks, DFB.de will preview all 18 amateur clubs who are featuring in the first round of the 73rd DFB Cup. Today it’s TuS Erndtebrück from the Regionalliga West.
Quite cool – that’s how Laurenz Wassinger comes across. He’s ice cold like a goal scorer should be. Nerves? Hardly a trace. Nevertheless the duel against SV Darmstadt in the first round of the DFB Cup by no means leaves the 24-year-old cold. “We were all really looking forward to getting a Bundesliga side,” says Laurenz Wassinger thinking back to the moment of the draw. Promoted Regionalliga side against promoted Bundesliga side – this is one of the appealing match-ups that this competition has drawn up from the 64 first-round teams.
Tickets have been on sale since Saturday for the game which will open the 2015/16 DFB Cup on Friday, 7th August. The game between the team from Siegen-Wittgenstein and Darmstadt will be shown live on TV from 19:00 CEST, which means that the game will not take place at the team’s home 3000-capacity Pulverwaldstadion because it not suitable for a live TV broadcast. The game will instead be played 30 kilometres away from the village of 7200 souls at the Leimbachstadion of Sportfreude Siegen. 10,000 people will fill this stadium, with 4150 tickets being allocated Darmstadt. “I think it could be full. We are prepared for anything in any case,” says Dirk Beitzel, head of Erndtebrück’s football division, on the biggest game in the club’s 120 year history.
"The anticipation is unbelievably big"
TuS Erndtebrück achieved promotion to the Regionalliga West in June as champions of the Oberliga Westfalen. On the first weekend in august, a few days before the Cup game, the adventure for Erndtebrück begins at Borussia Mönchengladbach’s U23s, last season’s champions. “The anticipation is unbelievably big,” says Erndtebrück’s manager Florian Schnorrenberg, also head of sport at the Blue-Whites. “I hope we can take this euphoria into the DFB Cup game,” says the 38-year-old, who is in charge of the small but keen club for the third season.
The club has had a superb history in the last 20 years. In 1994 it achieved promotion to the Landesliga Westfalen 2, six years later it made the jump to the Verbandsliga (renamed Nordrheinwestfalenliga in 2011), and since then has finished fourth, fifth and now first in the Oberliga Westfalen. The man behind the success is Jörg Schorge, the chairman of the Erndtebrücker Eisenwerke (Erndtebrück steelworks). The company produces steel tubing and his around 2500 employees around the world, with over 500 in Erndtebrück. And many of them support TuS.
Holger Klose, in charge of the second team in the Westfalenliga, got to the heart of the matter after the championship win by saying, “just imagine: our village is in the Regionalliga. Hard to believe.” Erndtebrück sealed their sensational promotion on the last day of the season against FC Gütersloh and so secured the final spot in the DFB Cup proper for the first time. Only three days later, just hours after winning the district cup, they were drawn with Bundesliga side Darmstadt – and the town went wild.
"Darmstadt 98 is an awesome draw"
“Darmstadt 98 is an awesome draw,” says the coach as he shows respect to the higher quality opponent. “What Dirk Schuster’s team has achieved is amazing.” The same could be said for his own team. In order to be competitive in a higher league, Schnorrenberg has strengthened his promoted squad with new players experienced in the Regionalliga, including Robin Schmidt from Bonner SC, Tim Treude from Rot-Weiß Essen or Sven Engelke from 1. FC Köln II, with Luigi Campagna coming from Italian fourth-division side USD San Severo.
With the right mix, the underdogs are hoping to be able to cause some surprises in the Regionalliga. Secretly, they are also hoping for a large coup against the ‘Lilies’. “There will be no need for motivation from my side. The boys are raring to go; they all want to play against Darmstadt,” says Schnorrenberg.
“Darmstadt are favourites. But we’ve seen often enough in the first round that the difference between a Bundesliga side and one from the Regionalliga is not always so big,” realises Laurenz Wassinger. The 6-foot-tall striker could be the deciding factor. The man who makes the difference like he so often does. The man from Essen scored 23 times in 33 games last season, as well as having shown his quality in over 80 Regionalliga games for VfL Bochum’s reserves and Wupperthaler SV. “The game against Darmstadt is the biggest so far in my career,” says Wassinger. “I hope that I can still say that after the game that it was my greatest.”
"Of course we’re hoping for an upset"
Erndtebrück recently undertook a five-day training camp at the Sportschule in Bitburg, and on 25th July, a week before the start of the league campaign, they won their final big test 2-1 against Sportfreude Siegen. It was also a practice run at the Leimbachstadion. Incidentally it isn’t the worst place for a cup upset. In the 1998/99 season, Siegen managed to reach the quarter finals of the DFB Cup from that stadium. “That’s quite a few days behind us now and old history. It would be a slight of fancy to compare ourselves to that,” says Florian Schnorrenberg.
Things, however, have changed in Siegerland: the small Erndtebrück is now number one, whilst Sportfreude will be playing this season in the Oberliga. Laurenz Wassinger on the contrary wants to charge on further with Erndtebrück, including in the DFB Cup. “Anything is possible. Of course we’re hoping for an upset,” says the Erndtebrück player quite coolly – a real goalscorer. But he also stresses, “If we were to win, it would be the same no matter who scored. We have a team in which every play can make the difference.” That can be interpreted over in Darmstadt as a declaration of war.
