June 5th and I'm going back 30 years to 1991 and a European Championship Qualifier between Wales and Germany at the old Cardiff Arms Park.
This was my one and only visit to this stadium and, as you can see from the cover of the programme, it was officially known as the National Stadium, although more popularly known as Cardiff Arms Park. The stadium had been designed in 1962 but wasn't officially opened until 1984 and it seems as though it was too small from the very start. It's design capacity was 65,000 but, following the Taylor Report (on the Hillsborough disaster) it's capacity had been reduced to 53,000 and a conversion to all seater would have further reduced it to 47,500. As you can see (on the video attached to my blog), the terrace was left empty for this match so the attendance was just 37,000 which was a real shame for such an attractive fixture. The writing was on the wall for the venue and the Arms Park was demolished in 1997 to make way for the new Millennium (or Principality) Stadium which opened in 1999. In fact the old stadium wasn't completely demolished and you can still see part of the old structure at the North end of the ground. Apparently this remains because the Millennium commission insisted that no part of the funding for the new stadium should go towards providing new facilities for Cardiff RFC (which shared a wall forming part of the old Arms Park). This explains why the new stadium doesn't form a complete bowl and the North end is sometimes called "Glanmor's gap" after the Chairman of the Welsh Rugby Union at the time the new stadium was being built.
But enough about Rugby. Today's match is legendary in Welsh football circles. Germany at the time were the world champions having won the World Cup as West Germany at Italia90. The separation of East and West Germany from a footballing viewpoint ceased after that World Cup. The qualification record of the Germans for the European Championships was phenomenal. At the time they had only ever lost three qualifiers. Wales were not expected to win.
Terry Yorath was the Welsh manager and he was able to select a first eleven that included Neville Southall, Kevin Ratcliffe, Dean Saunders, Ian Rush, Mark Hughes and Gary Speed. Germany, being managed by (Scotland fans look away now) Berti Vogts, fielded nine of their World Cup winning line-up: Illgner, Berthold, Kohler, Reuter, Brehme, Buchwald, Voeller, Matthaus and Klinsmann.
The key moment in the match came in the 69th minute and a long through ball to Rush left him one-on-one against Illgner and he made no mistake to score the only goal of the game. Southall was outstanding throughout the match and the World Champions simply couldn't find a way to score. Sadly Wales were unable to build on this fine result and finished second in the qualification group behind the Germans who went on to reach the Final of the 1992 European Championships in Sweden before succumbing to, of all teams, Denmark. Germany clearly had a problem when playing small, feisty nations didn't they?
CRB Match No. 725
Comments
Post a Comment