It is twenty six years since the German All Stars, founder members of the Yau Yee League, last won the division one championship. Much has changed over the years, which has seen Hong Kong, the then last bastion of the British Empire morph into an international city with a unique one-country-two-systems form of governance.
Back then the player-manager of GAS was the legendary Henrik Lorenz,www.aswissreplicas.com one of the big pushers in getting the league off the ground in 1977. At approximately 50 years of age Henrik could still throw himself around the pitch and was a larger than life leader both on and off the field, Henrik sadly passed away ten years ago this year and is still fondly remembered by many in Hong Kong and his legacy is carried on through his charity work, rest in peace, Der Kaiser. In front of him and to name too few were the legendary Graham Cartner at left-back who had starred for the HKFC first team in his mid-teens and was, in the opinion of the author, the most outrageous-and-fun-to-be-with pxxshead since the beginning of mankind, rest in peace, Graham, in the middle of the park, a-nine-stone-wet-through Douglas Moyes, from Paisley in the West of Scotland, ruled the midfield with typical Scottish tenacity and is now in self-imposed exile in San Antonio and up front the pairing of Keith Bretnall and Haneef Mohammed scored goals for fun and both remain domiciled in Hong Kong. Fast forward to today, the current player manager of GAS, Adam Wise, is an eighth-generation-tin-miner from the Forrest of Dean, who after been sent to the corner shop to buy a bottle of milk and a Daily Mirror ended up going the wrong way on a people smuggling container to Calais and had to eke out a living in a suburb of Paris only to be found to be one of the very few in the area to be able to do his 7 times table…he was subsequently fast-tracked into the back office of a French bank and then shipped off to their Hong Kong office…similar to his doppelganger, Graham, all those years ago, Wisey can put a ball on a sixpence from 60 yards and doesn’t mind leaving his boot in whilst turning at the same speed as milk/the Queen Mary doing a 3-pointer, ably assisted by Steve Cairns, remarkably employed at tax payer’s expense to teach primary schoolers in Sheung Shui how to talk like the hybrid child of Jack Duckworth and Cilla Black, as assistant manager and midfield dynamo and Mark Jobling as club skipper and with goals coming in abundance from Aaron Martindale who, luckily for him, escaped the clutches of St Helens, Lancashire, and the people therein. While many things have changed over the years the GAS Class of ’16 carry on the long held tradition of playing hard on the pitch and hard in the pub afterward. If you want to get into the bar before the Germans, you better be quick...Vorsprung durch Technik.
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German All Stars 1989-90
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