Why did Pospichal never forgive Hruska? And why did the Kangaroo goalkeeper have more trials in Greece than intercepted matches?

Pospíchal had a sniff of players. And he understood football very well, which was recognized by his wards at all the clubs where he worked as a coach. “But he also had his quirks and when he sat on someone, he made them feel it,” Zdeněk Hruška revealed why things never clicked too well between him and the coach.

“I served in the army in Tachov, and in the second year Pospíchal went to watch every one of our matches. After the last one, he arrived from Pilsen Tatra 603 with transfer tickets and wanted me to sign them. I didn’t have time for that, because Pepík Čaloun was catching in Pilsen at the time and he was catching excellently. He was even flirting with a boy, and he was only twenty-five, so I didn’t see much chance of getting into the gate. He hurried me along, assuring me that he would cut off Čalouna and that I would catch, but I couldn’t imagine that well enough. That’s why I didn’t sign the transfer to Pilsen and we broke up in a bad way,” explained Zdeněk Hruška, why he rejected the Pilsen engagement and signed with Prague Bohemians.

“But we met after a year. And in Bohemka. We came back from vacation and Pospíchal was the first person I met in Ďolíček. You probably don’t know it yet, but I’m your new boss now. You won’t have it easy with me, believe me,” he welcomed me even before we learned that coach Bohumil Musil quit after the season and was replaced by Pospíchal.

Neither Zdeněk Hruška nor his teammates really had it easy, yet it was under Pospíchal that the Kangaroos won their first and also their last championship title. This June, it will be exactly forty years since he was celebrated in Ďolíček after the win against Žilina in the penultimate league round.

“But there could and should have been many more. We had an extremely strong squad, so the team’s performance was not affected when the fourteenth or fifteenth player of the squad appeared in the lineup. But Pospichal was a coach who didn’t like it when there was calm in the cabin. He artificially caused storms so that unrest reigned, rotated the lineup unnecessarily, kicked out players who belonged to the team,” Zdeněk Hruška pondered on the sportu.cz microphone about why there was only one championship coronation for the Kangaroos.

He drew the coach’s anger upon himself in the memorable semi-final match of the UEFA Cup with Anderlecht Brussels. Pospichal didn’t put the Kangaroo’s key man Přemysl Bičovský in the starting line-up, and neither after the match nor later did he reveal what led him to do so. Only in the corridors was there speculation about the reasons…

“The fans behind the gate were shouting at me for the whole first half, why Přemek wasn’t playing. ‘Ask the coach,’ I answered them, because we knew most of them well over the years. And they asked and chanted that they wanted Bicovský. He couldn’t stand it and put Přemek on in the second half, but in his eyes I was the one who provoked the fans and incited them to protest and chant,” Zdeněk Hruška revealed that this was also one of the reasons why he finally left Ďolíček to join his neighbors in Eden .

“Moving abroad was unrealistic after the World Cup in Spain and the failed qualification for the European Championship in France, and we only communicated with Pospíchal at that time through his assistants, so a move to Slavia was a way out.”

In Kopačky na hříbíku, of course, there was talk of the mentioned Mundial ´82 in Spain, where the Czechoslovak national team ended up in the group after a draw with Kuwait, a defeat with England and a draw with France.

“All three goalkeepers bounced back when we were in Spain. Me, Seman and Stromšík,” Hrušek sighed even after forty-one years and thought about the reasons that led to the embarrassment at that time.

“There were a lot of them. A long training camp in the Tatras, then roaming around Italy, where we played one day in the north and the next day in the south with league clubs just to earn money to stay at the World Cup. Kozák and Masný, who went to the World Championship for a reward, are in the squad. The submarine sickness started the moment we arrived in Spain. Some players were really looking forward to getting out and going home.”

But Zdeněk Hruška also recalled his foreign engagements in Greece and Austria at the Sport.cz microphone.

“In Véria, we saved the league with God’s help, but then the club ran out of money. At Pragosport at the time, they told me that they could not interfere in this and that I had to take care and pay the money myself. In the end, I had more trials in Greece than intercepted matches. I won them all, the president of the club was locked up, only to be released on bail again, but the payment was never made.”

In the end, there was not even a transfer to PAOK Thessaloniki, which was interested in hiring Zdenek Hruška. One of the legends of the Vršovice Kangaroos tells about this in the next installment of Kopaček na hříbík, as well as reminiscing about another not-so-successful stint in Wacker Vienna.

Understandably, there were also his returns to Botič as a player and later also as a coach in the times when things went from ten to five with the Kangaroos. And they were interesting memories worth listening to.