Steffen Freund

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Also encourages a complete lack of appreciation for punctuation and grammar. Stupid Facebook.

:townhmm:

worrying about strangers lack of appreciation for grammer?!
u have big issues my friend. id hate for a real problem to happen to u.

besides, we are just talking crap on an internet forum. so does it really matter?

u really like to polish turds dont u!

& i hate to burst your bubble but when u die your diary

isnt going to be the next anne frank.

we arent important to the world. no one important cares about what you write.

honestly mate, read back on anything u have written. it wont be remembered or go down as amazing literature.
hate to be the 1 to break this to u.

& lets not forget u think needless insults & digs is fine. but bad grammer isnt. to me that sums up the cold world we are living in. u get annoyed with a world where grammer isnt appreciated but insulting people is fine.
 
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worrying about strangers lack of appreciation for grammer?!
u have big issues my friend. id hate for a real problem to happen to u.

besides, we are just talking crap on an internet forum. so does it really matter?

u really like to polish turds dont u!

& i hate to burst your bubble but when u die your diary

isnt going to be the next anne frank.

we arent important to the world. no one important cares about what you write.

honestly mate, read back on anything u have written. it wont be remembered or go down as amazing literature.
hate to be the 1 to break this to u.

& lets not forget u think needless insults & digs is fine. but bad grammer isnt. to me that sums up the cold world we are living in. u get annoyed with a world where grammer isnt appreciated but insulting people is fine.

Chill, it was just a friendly dig. No need to go into one.

In all honesty, it may not be important to you - write how you like, but people would certainly take you more seriously if you didn't write like a 7 year old.
 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/32917928

Champions League final: Steffen Freund - How I resisted the Stasi
By Steve CrossmanBBC World Service Sport

Berlin, venue for Saturday's Champions League final between Barcelona and Juventus, was a very different city 27 years ago. Then, with the Berlin Wall still standing, East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, would often target sports people as potential informants.


It's 1988 in the German Democratic Republic, known to most as East Germany, still over a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

A future German international and Champions League winner is thrown into a dark room in Brandenburg (an area which surrounds the German capital) before two men sit him in a chair, click on their torches and shine them directly into his eyes.

"You will work for the Stasi and tell us about your team-mates," the men say. "If you don't, your family will be in trouble."

Steffen Freund, then playing for Stahl Brandenburg, looks back at the agents of East Germany's fearsome secret police and says no. He is 17 years old.

Linked to Russia's infamous KGB security agency, the Stasi were regarded as one of the most effective intelligence agencies of the Cold War. They conducted surveillance on their own people and engaged in a process called Zersetsung - or "decomposition" - designed to mentally harass potential informants or those that might cause trouble for them.

But Freund, now 45, did not fall apart. "The power of the Stasi was massive," he recalls. "You can't imagine the pressure.

"They tried to build networks in football teams and they had all the information. If you went to Austria to play a friendly, they would find out which player was maybe thinking about not coming home and they would be stopped from travelling."

_83288612_stasi_getty.jpg

A wall outside the former Stasi building in Berlin is covered in graffiti in December 1989, the month after the Berlin Wall came down

As a young and talented footballer, Freund was one of very few people in the country who could travel beyond the Wall, let alone to another country.

That made him an obvious target for a state security service whose primary goal was to control society.

"At that age, to say no was hard," the former Borussia Dortmund, Tottenham Hotspur and Germany midfielder says. "Would you say no or yes?"

It is a dilemma the modern-day footballer can thankfully only imagine and making the decision was all the harder because the Stasi were not starting from scratch. They were building on a bedrock of propaganda years in the making.

"We were taught at school not to leave East Germany," Freund says. "'Don't go to West Germany' they would say, 'the people over there have no jobs'.

"We understood that the Soviet Union was our big brother and we were told, 'you don't need to go anywhere'."

With that ideology being hammered down at every turn, Freund admits to becoming suspicious of his team-mates, knowing they too would have been approached.

_83330484_stasifilesinberlin_ap.jpg

An unidentified official arranges old Stasi files in Berlin, in 2002. The Stasi kept tabs on East Germany's population via a network of citizens-turned-informants

One club, Dynamo Dresden, was rumoured to have 18 players working with the secret police.

"It was scary, but that was how it worked," Freund says. "The East Germans lived in fear. They'd be in contact with your friends, they knew everything about you. That's why a lot of people went to jail for nothing, maybe just for being in contact with West Germans.

"I still feel for those people," he says. "Disappointed isn't the right word, it's deeper than that."

Even now, we don't know everything there is to know about the Stasi. We know sportsmen like East German footballer Falko Gotz felt he was under such heavy surveillance that he fled, successfully, to the West in 1983. He received a one-year ban from Fifa, but continued his career with Bayer Leverkusen.

But shredded Stasi files still reside in the German capital, where the debate about whether or not they should be restored was revived last year as the nation marked 25 years since the fall of the Berlin wall.

Freund was fortunate. His brave decision to say no did not come at a cost.

"In the end they couldn't put me under enough pressure because my family was clean," he remembers. "I said to the men, 'I like East Germany but I can't look at my team-mates and tell you who would want to escape. I'd never do it because I have team spirit.'"

Only seven men played for both East Germany and the unified German national team. Freund is one of them.

_83278678_steffen_freund2_getty.jpg

Freund, who won Euro 96 with Germany and played in the 1998 World Cup, moved to Tottenham in 1998

He also has a Champions League winners medal from 1997 as part of the Borussia Dortmund squad - alongside German internationals such as Matthias Sammer, Jurgen Kohler, Andreas Moller and Karl-Heinz Riedle, plus Scot Paul Lambert - that became the first (and last) German side to win the cup on home soil.

With that history in mind, he is already one of the region's favourite sons. But he is keen to stress he holds no bad feeling toward his former home.

"We had enough food," he says. "There was no luxury but we were never hungry and we enjoyed living there."

That too makes him lucky, but he'll never forget the day that could have stopped in its tracks a career on its way to the top.

"I'm still surprised I said no," Freund says and shakes his head. "I still remember their last words. 'If you tell your family, you are in trouble and maybe your parents will go to jail.'.

"Then they switched off their torches and I went home."

You can listen to the full interview with Steffen Freund on the Sportsworld programme on BBC World Service on Saturday, 6 June.
Yeah, but what if one of them had been Roy Keane?
 
Chill, it was just a friendly dig. No need to go into one.

In all honesty, it may not be important to you - write how you like, but people would certainly take you more seriously if you didn't write like a 7 year old.

fair enough. but in all honesty i have no complex or ego about being taken seriously by strangers on an internet forum.
but i understand if u do & its important to u.
good for u.
 

"I am sure one day I will come back to the club because I love Tottenham Hotspur and I love the Premier League. I want to work for Tottenham Hotspur again. I have a meeting on the 22nd with Donna Cullen to maybe still be involved. Perhaps I could do something for the club in the future because it is in my heart. When you play for Tottenham Hotspur for four-and-a-half-years and are in the Hall of Fame, how can you go away without tears?"

#AbsoluteYiddo

:freundgoal:
 
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"I am sure one day I will come back to the club because I love Tottenham Hotspur and I love the Premier League. I want to work for Tottenham Hotspur again. I have a meeting on the 22nd with Donna Cullen to maybe still be involved. Perhaps I could do something for the club in the future because it is in my heart. When you play for Tottenham Hotspur for four-and-a-half-years and are in the Hall of Fame, how can you go away without tears?"

#AbsoluteYiddo

:freundgoal:

When did leave? Yes he had some bullshit title of International blah, blah, blah and hasn't been seen around, but don't recall a single thing said about him leaving.

Edit: He is still listed on the Spurs site as part of the coaching staff: http://www.tottenhamhotspur.com/first-team/coaching-staff/
 
I assume he'll be in the away end again at Old Trafford on the opening day of the season??
...maybe in his official capacity as Club cheerleader!!!
 
I assume he'll be in the away end again at Old Trafford on the opening day of the season??
...maybe in his official capacity as Club cheerleader!!!
Hope so. I stood about 5 rows behind his son at the Emirates a few years back, he came over before kick off, shaking hands with everyone.
Remember these going around last year:


 
He really is the best worst player we've ever had at the club!

Yeah yeah Blanchflower, Mackay, Greaves, Hoddle, Bale.... but which one of them ever started "Oh When the Spurs..." on the London Underground???
 
I'd love to see Steffen take over Spurs TV from that boring embarrassing bloke we currently have! :freund:
What a fucking great idea!

That bearded bloke is very poor, the questions he asks are embarrassing and cringeworthy. The dutch fella is barely an improvement.
What I have noticed recently is a massive improvement in our tweets since the tweet bloke from Charlton has joined, genuinely interactive and good humoured.
 
What a fucking great idea!

That bearded bloke is very poor, the questions he asks are embarrassing and cringeworthy. The dutch fella is barely an improvement.
What I have noticed recently is a massive improvement in our tweets since the tweet bloke from Charlton has joined, genuinely interactive and good humoured.




I'd actually prefer this guy to do the player interviews after the match etc ...

Oh, and just a reminder of how good Steffen Freund and Holtby were on Spurs TV :freundgoal::holtbytongue:
 
We need more of this back at the Lane.

849c3fe8a8e62b43993bd9f73b1efa84.gif


freund3.gif


Smouldering Latin passion is all well and good, but what we all really want to see is a grown man celebrating like a German kid with special needs.
 
He's been on Austrian TV a LOT in the last few weeks... was a pundit for the Dortmund/Spurs & Liverpool games (obviously) ...and again at Wembley on Saturday for Everton v Man U semi.

I have to say, his hair has GROWN... and I still can't understand a fucking word he says (other than ARBEIT!) but other than that, it's good to 'see him' again so regularly...
:freund:
 
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