Unusual Ascension Celebration
Grosskreutz’ super team tears apart the competition
05/16/2022, 12:31 p.m
While Borussia Dortmund stumbles emotionally but a little at a loss from the Bundesliga season, a black and yellow cult footballer is in the best of moods: Kevin Großkreutz and his club, TuS Bövinghausen, are promoted to the Oberliga after an outstanding season.
When Kevin Großkreutz found out that his current team, TuS Bövinghausen, had been promoted, the 2014 world champion actually let it rip for another reason. The former cult footballer from Borussia Dortmund, who ended his professional career after last season, is in Cologne with his friends, including singer Pietro Lombardi, celebrating his bachelor party. As the icing on the cake, the news of the blunder from competitor DJK TuS Hordel fluttered into the party.
Now the promotion of the Dortmund Vorstadtklubs to the Oberliga, the fifth highest division, is anything but a miracle. The 33-year-old’s team was too dominant in the competition, in 31 games so far there have only been three defeats, 24 games have been won and 89 goals have been scored. Describing Bövinghausen as FC Bayern of the Westfalenliga 2 comes very close to the truth, but should not meet with much approval from the eternal heart of Borussia Großkreutz. So be it. The TuS, that was already clear before the season, is too big for this league. And everything was geared towards ascension.
In addition to the world champion, David Odonkor, among others, had joined the team, but mainly to advance the areas of marketing and management, on the field he acted as the right winger, who made his history at the 2006 World Cup, only as a part-time worker. This also applied to the former professional Baris Özbek (among others, Union Berlin, MSV Duisburg and Galatasaray are active), but who had already said goodbye to Turkey during the season for family reasons.
A few years ago “Bövi” played in the district league, in the future in the fifth highest division. Opponents there include SG Wattenscheid 09, Sportfreunde Siegen and FC Gütersloh. That sounds like a touch of the big football world. Not as big as BVB, who stumbled out of the season very emotionally on Saturday. The man behind TuS’s success is Ajan Dzaferoski. He made this top squad possible with many Grosskreutz friends. Many stories are told in the Westfalenliga about the financial resources of the patron, not all flatter the hotel owner and club president.
Großkreutz railed against critics
Großkreutz, who after the last few difficult years in the professional business is now making good headlines again, celebrates the promotion with an emotional message on Instagram: “We made it, promotion to the Oberliga. Huge respect to our coaches and the team – you have YOU deserve it,” he wrote and then railed against the critics of the football project, which was extremely controversial in the competition in Dortmund: “Statements like ‘this is not a team’, ‘they can’t do it’ and so on: Nobody knows us , because we stuck together and always stayed calm. It’s just the reward we deserve.”
Sebastian Tyrala, who replaced Sven Thormann as coach in November and thus caused quite a stir in the Dortmund football scene, said the “Reviersport” after the success: “You shouldn’t take promotion for granted. Everyone always told us that we absolutely had to get promoted and that of course puts a certain amount of pressure on the players. We struggled a lot in every game. We were always against the whole village was there and every team gave even more against us.” Meanwhile, it was always peaceful and fair, as Grosskreutz thanked in his Instagram post.
The club boss was also happy: “The promotion from the Westfalenliga is of course an outstanding feeling and I also believe that we rightly became champions. You don’t achieve such a performance overnight and the team has to remain constant and work hard “We managed to get promoted and that fills us with pride. Next season we’ll be playing in the Oberliga and of course we’ll have to find our way around first,” Dzaferoski confessed to “Reviersport”.
