When a coach turned spy

When two leading hockey nations play against each other, normally the result is an interesting match. The semifinal at the world cup in Bombay in 1982 between Germany and Australia was one of these exciting matches. The Australians, who were the favourites in this game had a number of the world best individual players on their team.

Shortly before the end of the regular playing time (2-1), and in the following extra time (3-2) they had the final just within the reach. Twice the Germans, namely Dopp and Montag, only just managed to equalize by fighting with all their might. Nearly 25,000 expert spectators of mainly Indian origin rewareded the two teams with a long applause for this breathtaking game that ended in a 3-3 draw.

Then a seven-metre penalty shoot out had to decided and here Christina Bassemir’s great moment began. The German goalie remembers every minute of it.

The FIH had introduced a new rule. For the first time each team had ten shootout, five players had two shots each and all the twenty shots were executed. Of the ten shots, I managed to save five, he sums up.

In “his best tournament ever” he became a hero. However, he also gives the national coach and his unusual methods credit for his fifty percent quato of saved shots: ”Clause Kleiter had dressed up as a tourist and sneaked into the Australians’ final training. There he secretly noted all the players’ favourites seven metre corners.

“That was valuable espionage, although Bassemir nearly felt sorry for the losing party in the end. “In 1980 we had traveled to Australia for three weeks and had become quite friendly with all the players, especially Peter Haselhurst and Ric Charlesworth. After this lost semifinal, the relations wasn’t the same any more” .

The public in Germany was aware of the fact that the hockey men had reached a world cup final (1-3) against Pakistan. Bassemir, who is on the Supervisory committee of the German Sports Aid Foundation today’: “We received a good media coverage with a visit at the Aktuelles Sporststudio” in the ZDF (Translator’s comment: One of the most prominent sports programme on public TV) and many other interviews”.

Source: German Hockey Federation’s souvenir Program 2006