Final round of the German championship: The hockey players of the BHC finally want to reward themselves with a title

Berlin - This year the men of the Berlin Hockey Club (BHC) should finally be able to win the German indoor championship. For the third time in a row they are now in the Final Four, which will take place in Düsseldorf this year. In 2020 they narrowly lost to the record champions Rot-Weiss Köln in the final. The 2021 finals had to be canceled due to the corona virus.

On Saturday, the Berliners will meet second in the Nordstaffel, Harvestehuder THC from Hamburg, in the semi-finals (6.45 p.m., live stream on sportschau.de) before beating the Mannheimer HC or Rot-Weiss Köln, who would play the other semi-final game.

After Berliner HC was able to prevail in the quarter-finals quite confidently against the second-placed team in the western league, HTC Uhlenhorst Mülheim, further victories should now follow in Düsseldorf: "We were able to organize the league very confidently and also the quarter-finals. It was great that a player like Paul Dösch could pull off such a performance there. That gives a lot of courage for next Saturday,” says coach Rein van Eijk.

Van Eijk always communicates very openly with his captain, whose ambition and joy in playing you would notice in every single training session: "He's making such extreme progress and is currently the best Paul I've ever seen," he says BHC coach. Dösch, who led the German national team in the hall as captain to the European Championship in 2020, was able to prove his standard strength in the quarter-finals and scored two goals from corners. Dösch was also there when the final was defeated in 2020: "Just two years ago we showed that the BHC can bring an absolutely top indoor team onto the pitch. There are now one or two good players who weren't there at the time."

"They say that you first have to learn to lose a final before you can win one"

The yearning for a title is correspondingly high after three Final Fours in a row: "We have many Players who have been playing at a fairly high level for years but have never been able to get any rewards for it. Two years ago in Stuttgart we were very close, on the field we were very close and I think now the third time we are most likely to finally make it.”

He would also like to do his part, lead the team and, with his standard strength, try to give the HTHC goalkeeper, Anton Brinckman, whom he also knows personally from the European Championships in Berlin, a corner goal or two. BHC coach van Eijk is also certain that the chance for the title has now come: "They say that you have to learn to lose a final before you can win one".

Against HTHC in the semi-finals they will face a much older team, all of whose key players are in their mid-30s. In contrast, the Berliners have an average age of around 25, making them the second youngest team in the competition. Nevertheless, Van Eijk is optimistic: “The HTHC has enormous quality and in Brinckman they have an extremely good goalkeeper, especially from corners. The good thing is that he hasn't encountered a corner of our quality yet. Accordingly, we calculate quite a bit.”

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The Dutchman also sees the statistics on the side of the Berliners and presents a very special calculation: "When the men last became field hockey champions in 2012, the previous title was already 47 years ago. Exactly the same number of years have now passed since our last indoor title.”