Nostalgia for the Ruhr-Silver-Agers – Frank Goosen’s book friends Fringe, Brocki and Förster try their hand at youth football at the “Spiel ab!”: litaturkritik.de

Frank Goossen’s book friends Fringe, Brocki and Förster try their hand at youth soccer in “Play off!”

Written by Frank Riedel

Review books/references

After the novel Forester, my Forester (2016), in which the three friends from Bochum mentioned in the subtitle of this review only want to get away from their VW Bulli shortly before their fiftieth birthday, and the sequel set thirty years earlier no wonder (2019), in which they lived the last summer before reunification in Berlin, which is still divided, and Frank Goossen ends the novel He plays! his trilogy. According to the author, the content should be about “the world in general and football in particular” – not too simple. Even Nick Hornby, his implied role model, had it in his masterpiece degree of fever (1992) acknowledged the sport’s fascination with the working class:

Football is an alternate world, as serious and stressful as work, with the same anxieties, hopes, disappointments and occasional exhilarations.

Like the residents of London, Manchester and Liverpool, football has also shaped the people in the hard-working cities of the Ruhr area. People in the former “Kohlenpott” still think he is particularly honest and traditional there. However, the regional pop star Goosen does not commit himself to VfL Bochum, as Grönemeyer did with his anthem to club and city in 1984, but takes the charm of lowland youth football from the regional league and treats the big clubs from Bochum-Dortmund or Gelsenkirchen as just an extra role. in his text.

Against this background, the established characters of the trilogy philosophize about football and meet for games in the Dahlbusch café or around the game’s association club. The reason for Frang’s employment as an unskilled youth coach lies in the intolerable neglect of his son Alex, whom he finally wants to make up for. The 25-0 loss to his team and the coach’s eventual resignation gave him a reason to do so. His friend Förster and tutor Brocki soon return with them and the three dispose of themselves On a Kreisklasse adventure that they have no idea about. Your junior team loves insulting each other in Albanian, Lebanese, Arabic or German and the new coach can’t stop it. This gaming league is – according to the genre of sports novels and films – inferior to each opponent in the beginning for many reasons. There is a ray of hope, like a sudden tie, in one of the following games, even if it gets lost again 1:12. Although the boys can be a perfectly assembled literary dream team in terms of personality and play, Goosen doesn’t seem to have taken the quote from Dortmund great Adi Preißler: “All theories are gray in life – but what matters is on the pitch.” The game scenes in particular refer to the theme of the main theme.

The new coach’s ball ideas are more than simple, warming up to just two rounds is of course more popular with the boys than the five with his predecessor. The motifs are more important to the adults involved and therefore define what happens: because “it’s soccer for kids, right? We’re not supposed to develop an AIDS vaccine here.” The drunk, the football maniac, with his partner in a fantastically realistic way about football or when a mother arbitrarily replaces her son due to special obligations, ignoring the rules of football. After all, the heroes of the novel mischievously raise a mirror to the author. The missing whistle in the square is mentioned so often obscurely that the comment in the novel that the joke is not made funnier by repetition speaks to the readers heart. Herberger’s and Beckenbauer’s quotes may no longer be familiar to everyone, but they belong—as at least in the novel in light of the clichés—in moth-box sayings. And since Brockie should accuse the youth again of “rotten language” because of WhatsApp!

it is in He plays! It’s all about the old days, when clubs were still called disco, Eric Beer scored for Hertha and music, and drunkenness and women’s affairs didn’t just rule life in Bochum, which makes sense for the reviewer. However, this all seems a little dated and a little social media isn’t going to change that. Musically, there’s a lot to listen to: a wild mix of Nirvana, Depeche Mode, the Rolling Stones and geekiness, with T-shirts emblazoned with the band playing a significant role when fringe’s nightly female acquaintances don them so they can open a surprise door for visitors.

There’s no doubt that Frank Goosen takes a bit of a pop writer’s liking, influencing his protagonists and making silversmiths his readers. In an environment over 50 years old, he can still register with his completely funny entertaining script, even if the events of the novel are experienced in memory mode. He presents himself as the archivist of football quotes from the past, who dares to approach current topics somewhat hesitantly. The multicultural youth team is allowed to position itself unflatteringly against racism, although the topic is currently on and off the field every weekend in German youth football. The recently obligatory sexual joke in some circles confirms this admirably.

One wonders how long He plays! Outside Bochum and the surrounding area, despite the huge marketing mechanisms on the book tables. Brockie might say: easy to read, but ephemeral. Or so that we don’t have to strain Giovanni Trapattoni: the decline seems to have sucked.

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