Bernd Nickel is still the midfielder with the most Bundesliga goals. On Tuesday, the Eintracht Frankfurt icon passed away at the age of 72. An obituary for “Dr. Hammer”.
He was mentioned in the same breath as Frankfurt’s 1974 World Champions, even though he only played in one senior international match. Like his friends Jürgen Grabowski and Bernd Hölzenbein, Bernd Nickel is one of the Eintracht legends who gave the club its face and character in the 1970s and 1980s. On Wednesday, “Dr. Hammer”, as he was called with admiration, passed away at the age of 72 after a long, serious illness.
The down-to-earth Middle Hessian, who was a native of both Frankfurt and his birthplace Eisemroth in the Lahn-Dill district during and after his career, owed his nickname to his feared shooting power and technique. In 426 Bundesliga appearances, Nickel scored 141 goals. Only nine of them came from penalties, as he himself sometimes remarked. For this respectable scoring rate is outstanding for a permanent midfielder such as he was.
Nickel scored from all four corners of the Waldstadion
There was less force than spin in a record Nickel mark: From all four corners of the then Waldstadion he directly converted a corner kick. On 22 November 1975, in a 6:0 win against FC Bayern, he loaded national goalkeeper Sepp Maier. The left-footer also achieved this feat against Kaiserslautern, Fortuna Düsseldorf and in the 9:2 win against Werder Bremen.
However, it was a bicycle kick into the corner that weighed the most heavily: on the penultimate matchday in 1971, he scored in this way in the derby against Kickers Offenbach. The subsequent 2-0 victory meant Eintracht stayed in the league – and the cancellation of his transfer to FC Bayern Munich, which would have been due upon relegation.
Nickel never really regretted it. For the trained telecommunications technician, the bond with his homeland was always greater than the urge to go out into the big, wide world. Even if, like many professionals of his generation, a career in the national team was hardly possible. The Bayern block often lined up on its own.
Nickel and teammate Trinklein set up the first Eintracht fan shop
Nickel was one of the first in the Bundesliga to discover merchandising. His teammate Gert Trinklein had the idea, and together they set up the first Eintracht fan shop. “We started with pins, cufflinks, then came the first jerseys,” “Naggel”, as former teammates affectionately called him, recounted in 2010 in an interview for the kicker series “What a guy!”.
The Eintracht of his time was often capable of winning titles, but in the end not title-ready enough. The “Diva from the Main” nevertheless celebrated great successes. Nickel won the DFB Cup three times with the Adlerträgern (1974, 1975, 1981) and the 1980 UEFA Cup in the finals against Borussia Mönchengladbach.
He was a member of the German Olympic squad at the 1972 Summer Games. After his active career, which he ended with Young Boys Bern in 1984, he was a regular when Eintracht played a home match in the Stadtwald – health permitting.
“We played in mud, ice, snow,” Nickel reported. He liked to tell anecdotes from the Bundesliga after convivial rounds of golf, without revealing intimate details. The real football topics were more important to him than gossip. And often there was a lack of understanding about sloppy flat passes on “such a good pitch today” or about “simply bad” corner kicks.
Someone like Nickel liked to put in extra shifts for shots and crosses: “I was an absolute street footballer, even as a child I spent hours shooting at the barn door and later, on Fridays after final training, I hit corners until my thighs glowed.”
The Bundesliga mourns the loss of one of the great and quiet ones in its history.