Special Moments
Alarm for Cobra Wegmann: BVB force their luck
Fortuna Köln — the club most fans in Germany probably only remember as the "life’s work" of entrepreneur Hans "Jean" Löring — were not a pushover. They had earned their place in the play-offs and they played with the desperation of a team that believed promotion was their destiny. In the first leg in Cologne, we had lost. The deficit was small but the psychological damage was significant. Coming back to Dortmund for the second leg, we knew that failure was not an option — not for the club, not for the city, and certainly not for the players who would have to live with the consequences. In Dortmund, relegation is not just a sporting result. It is an existential crisis.
Fortuna Köln — the club most fans in Germany probably only remember as the "life's work" of entrepreneur Hans "Jean" Löring († 2005) — had already destroyed a great opportunity for Dortmund in 1983, demolishing BVB 5-0 in the DFB-Pokal semi-final. And now? We should actually be grateful that we had this chance in the play-offs at all.
Nothing seemed to work in Dortmund any more. Not on the pitch, and certainly not financially. Emergency sales were needed, key players had left, and the squad was held together by willpower rather than quality. The training ground felt like a place of collective anxiety rather than preparation. And yet there was something about that 1986 squad — a stubbornness, a refusal to accept what everyone else considered inevitable — that gave me hope. Coach Reinhard Saftig, just 34 years old, had taken over a sinking ship and somehow kept it afloat through sheer force of personality.
He was not a tactical genius but he understood what BVB meant to its people, and he transmitted that understanding to us.
We were also trailing against the Köln side in the second leg at half-time. 0-1. Our luck was that the play-offs had no away-goals rule yet, otherwise we'd have needed four goals to send Fortuna down. But scoring even three against this doggedly defending team on such a hot day was about as easy as having to drain the Möhnesee with a teaspoon.
At half-time, deathly silence in the dressing room. I looked Eike Immel deep in the eyes. "Kobra" — my nickname, because I once described myself as a striker "more venomous than the most venomous snake" — "Kobra," he eventually screamed at me, "I swear to you we're not going down!"
Fine! But how? Somehow we managed to turn the match around. With friendly assistance from referee Aaron Schmidthuber from Munich, who awarded us a penalty that was — let us say diplomatically — generous, we equalised. The Westfalenstadion erupted. At that moment, something shifted. The doubt that had hung over the squad for months evaporated, replaced by a wild, almost irrational belief that we could do this. The players who had looked defeated at half-time now played as if possessed. Every tackle was a statement, every run forward an act of defiance. The crowd, sensing the shift, raised the noise to a level I have never experienced before or since.
Fortuna Köln, who had been so composed in the first half, began to wilt under the onslaught — the heat, the noise, the desperation of an entire city bearing down on them.
Then Marcel Raducanu headed in the 2-1. I retrieved the ball from the net after both goals to prevent any time-wasting from the Köln side. There were now 22 minutes left and we needed one more goal to force a third match.
That the second leg would be decided in the 90th minute was something I already knew. I'd told our coach Reinhard Saftig in a meeting three days earlier. Along with the demand to keep me on the pitch until the final whistle. Saftig listened. By bringing on Ingo Anderbrügge, who replaced Lothar Huber after 46 minutes, he also made the key substitution.
Injury time was already running. If it stayed 2-1, Borussia Dortmund would be relegated. The three-time German champions, the first German European cup winners of 1966, would face a bleak financial future. That a year later they would storm into the UEFA Cup with a 4-0 final-day win in Frankfurt, win the DFB-Pokal in striped socks in 1989, and conquer Europe with Ottmar Hitzfeld — all of that was unimaginable in this moment.
All of that would have been a humiliation for a BVB that had been searching for lost time for years. The club had everything: a great stadium, magnificent fans — but not yet a success formula. Things turned out differently. Fortunately. For me, for BVB, for the entire region.
To this day, BVB fans approach me about my goal for 3-1, which secured us the decisive third match in Düsseldorf. The goal is still present in my mind. That film will probably run before my mind's eye forever. As if in a trance, I see a cross from the right by Bernd Storck, a double headed flick-on from Michael Zorc and Daniel Simmes…
I poked the ball somehow over the goal line, ran with it across the line. Daniel Simmes, leaping in the air in the photos of my goal — I hadn't seen him that fit all season as in that moment…