Today’s Shorts feature collects up a selection of West German based stories from the 1960s and 1970s.

Viktoria Köln has the distinction of fielding the very first black player in West German football. Anyama was a Nigerian international studying at Köln University in the early 1960s and he was spotted while playing scratch games with fellow students. Viktoria signed him up and he made his debut for them in 1961.

For one team to turn up to a friendly match expecting better and more glamorous opponents than actually awaited them might be considered accidental; when their opponents find themselves in exactly the same position, it’s nothing short of carelessness. Borussia Mönchengladbach toured Brazil during the 1967 close-season and thought they had booked a game against powerful Botafogo, the Rio giants who featured Jairzinho and Gérson in their squad. Instead they had actually been booked to play the little known Botafogo Ribeiro Preto from Sao Paulo. The Brazilians weren’t happy either: for their part they were expecting a quite different Borussia – the winners of the 1966 European Cup-Winners Cup, Borussia Dortmund.

Adopted BTLM cult-hero Max Merkel was an Austrian coach who made his name in West Germany with Munich 1860 and Nurnberg. Max was an arrogant and opinionated man with very little regard for criticism or abuse, particularly from fans. Jeered before a Bundesliga match at Köln, Max made famous what became known as the Swabian greeting – he bent over and patted his backside in the direction of the jeering fans

The same Bundesliga fixture almost exactly a year to the day apart: 7th January 1967 – Borussia Mönchengladbach 11 Schalke 0. 6th January 1968 – Borussia Mönchengladbach 1 Schalke 6.

Sepp Maier was a wonderful keeper with a weakness when it came to saving penalties. He failed to stop any of the first 19 he faced with Bayern Munich until, finally, he saved the 20th taken by Pohlschmidt of Schalke 04.