Simon Cooper
speaker
334 appearances
5 recordings
4 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 10 Jul
Simon Cooper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 4.
Appearances
And it's a very nervous event for the East German regime.
So they send party comrades as the kind of official fan group.
They hope not to be embarrassed by a very good West German team.
as it is East Germany win 1-0, Jürgen Sparwasser, who later defects to the West, I believe.
So it's a very complex, you know, story in the psychodrama of East and West Germany.
And this is also just after Chancellor Willy Brandt, I think, had resigned by that point because his chief aide, Gunther Guillaume, had been exposed as an East German spy, which was unfortunate.
So it was a very... I remember that.
a very complex moment in East-West relationship.
East Germany win the biggest prestige battle of the two Germanys, but then West Germany win the World Cup, which I think is the kind of story of the Cold War prefigured.
I'm doing this theater tour of the Netherlands now.
I go around Dutch theaters.
I give this talk on the World Cup and geopolitics and everything.
And we show this picture of the Dutch team arriving back home in 74, having lost the final, welcomed by enormous cheering crowds.
They then go to the prime minister's residence where we have a photograph of the players and members of the royal family and the prime minister dancing the conga.
So there was no mourning in the Netherlands at all.
There was this immense pride, this small country finishing second in the world.
That's great.
And they were right to feel immense pride.
Imagine, if you can suspend disbelief, Ireland finishing second in the world.
You lose the final to Germany.
Showing 201–220 of 334 · page 11 of 17
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