The East German team that refused to die

Twenty-five years ago, in 1990, Germany was reunified, and the state of East German ceased to exist. But in the dying days of the so called Democratic Republic one international football match in Belgium remained to be played. Many of the best players saw no point in turning up- but those who did gave all they had.

It was on 12 September 1990 that East Germany's fate was sealed. At a ceremony in Moscow the foreign ministers of East and West Germany and the four occupying powers - Britain, France, the US and the Soviet Union - signed a treaty that brought about German unification three weeks later.
As the signatures were drying on the historic document a group of East German footballers were preparing for their own farewell, hundreds of miles to the west, in Brussels.
"I knew that that game would go into the history books. I was proud to be called up and we wanted to go out on a high note," remembers Uwe Rosler, then a 21-year-old striker playing for FC Magdeburg.
Communist East Germany had won more renown on the running track and in the pool than on the football pitch. In the last summer Olympics before the fall of the Berlin Wall - in Seoul in 1988 - it had come second only to the Soviet Union in the medals table.

Its best moments in football had come earlier, in the 1970s.
In 1976 the East German football team won Olympic gold, but the victory that mattered most was the one in Hamburg, in the 1974 World Cup, against the class enemy, West Germany.
In an exquisite piece of Cold War theatre, Juergen Sparwasser burst into the penalty area, thumped the ball into the roof of the net and turned a somersault in celebration. It was the only goal and the only time the two Germanys ever played each other.
But ironically, on the brink of its demise, East Germany had perhaps its strongest team ever. It needed only a draw from its final game against Austria to qualify for the 1990 World Cup. As the squad was about to gather at its training camp, however, in late 1989, the government opened the Berlin Wall.
Overnight East German footballers became hot property. Clubs from the West German Bundesliga sensed an opportunity to snap up talent, and the players realised that for the first time in their lives there was the chance of earning serious money.