1999/00 season: BVB is currently racing from victory to victory. That was completely different 23 years ago. A series of defeats made everyone despair – and gave a man his Bundesliga return, which nobody had thought possible. And in Leverkusen they finally won a title again – albeit differently than expected!
In these days, when BVB is rushing from victory to victory, Borussia’s crisis in the 1999/2000 season seems almost unreal. Back then, BVB failed to win 19 times in a row and had a really bad season. With a banner in the Westfalenstadion, the spectators showed their displeasure in an amusing way: “SV Rödinghausen. Kreisliga C. Should we warm up?” As a last resort, Borussia finally signed the old star coach Udo Lattek in desperation. A week before he was hired as BVB coach, Lattek had written in a column: “Will a new change of coach help? Actually, I’m against it. And it’s also a question of alternatives. Who’s on the market?”
And since the market was actually empty, Lattek finally did it himself. Together with Matthias Sammer, he was supposed to help Borussia from relegation in the last five games. A mammoth task, but who else could have done it if not him? Almost ten years earlier, when asked who the best coach was, this same Udo Lattek had answered, as usual, modestly: “The Lattek, when he was still a coach.” So now, in 2000, he has returned to one of his earlier stations in the area. Borussia Dortmund was on the verge of the end of the season when President Gerd Niebaum had the crazy idea of ??promoting Udo Lattek to the post of head coach again.
But before he could save Dortmund, they first had to agree on money matters. Lattek later proudly said that it wasn’t the rumored one million that Dortmund paid for these five games, but two of them. And in addition there should have been a new Mercedes 500 (“We are more or less in agreement about the finances. But I would also like to have such a car”), since Lattek had seen that Gerd Niebaum already drove such a beautiful and rare car .
“You dog,” the president shouted at this request, but finally took it. “But I never drove it – the delivery time was too long. So I had it paid out to me,” Lattek later recalled with a grin. Once again he got the best out of it. True to his maxim: “I always took the money. After all, I didn’t want to hurt anyone.”
In the end, BVB actually secured relegation – also because of the special motivational skills of its coach Udo Lattek. Later on, Matthias Sammer talked about the meeting before the decisive game at VfB Stuttgart.
At the time, Lattek swore in the team with these words: “I’ll tell you a story now. You’re sitting at home, very comfortably in the living room, have put your feet up and are watching a nice film on TV with your wife. Glass of red wine with you. And Suddenly you hear a crack and black hooded burglars are in your house. ‘Man, what are you doing there?’, Udo Lattek asked the ‘coke maker’ and brute man decker Jürgen Kohler. Secretly, of course, he expected that he would get excited and jump up and loudly: ‘Coach, of course. You have to knock them out!’ But Kohler sat back and said, ‘Coach, you have to stay calm in a situation like this!’ And Udo Lattek, the old fox, only paused for a moment and then said: ‘Exactly. You stay calm. And that’s how you have to play today. With a lot of calm and a sense of proportion, then it’ll work!'” And indeed : BVB won this crucial game on matchday 32 2-1. One of the scorers: The very relaxed and calm Jürgen Kohler!
A drama of a very special kind happened at Bayer Leverkusen this season. Actually, the club was ready for the title, but in the end Bayer was once again at a disadvantage after a heated duel with Bayern. Previously, poisonous arrows had flown back and forth between the two clubs until Uli Hoeneß and Rainer Calmund agreed on a truce shortly before the end of the season.
With Leverkusen’s assistant coach Roland Koch, however, the attacks from Munich went in one ear and out the other immediately: “We read the sayings, but they bounce off the skin. There are simply signs of wear and tear over the years. That’s it like with the hunter and the hare. If the hunter just shoots blindly into the forest ten times, the hare won’t run away the eleventh time either. He then knows: Nothing’s going to happen there anyway. We just look to the Rhine to see what’s happening behind we don’t care.”
When Bayer is second in the table after the 25th matchday and the 9-1 win at SSV Ulm 1846, Reiner Calmund says: “I’ll sign a contract immediately that guarantees us that we’ll always be second in the next five years.” A suggestion he may have reconsidered on Matchday 34. That day, Bayer played at Spielvereinigung Unterhaching, just a few kilometers away from Bayern, who played Werder Bremen at home. A point at the club was enough for the Leverkusen team, about which their own president Engelbert Kupka had said so farsightedly before the season: “Of course we will be the underdogs in the coming season. But they can also bite – in the calves, because we don’t get any higher.”
Now they could make history on this final day of the round. And it succeeded. In the end, Unterhaching won 2-0, Bayern easily won 3-0 and were German champions. After three second places within four years, the title “Vizekusen” was born and became the new stigma of the former “pill club”.