Birthday boy of the month 1: Dietmar Demuth turns 70

As a teenager he played for TuS Osdorf, a sports club in the district of Altona. As a U19 player he joined FC St. Pauli where the qualified electrician was in the squad of the second tier club from the 1974/75 season and he made his debut in May 1975 in a 4-0 away for the Hamburg team in Münster. The defender was a first choice in the Pauli first team the season after and he went on to play in all 38 games. After four successful years at Millerntor, where Demuth helped St. Pauli achieve their first promotion to the Bundesliga in 1976/77, Bayer 04 signed him in 1979. Leverkusen had just been promoted to Germany's top flight for the first time.

The ball-winning and strong in the air central defender, who formed the rugged central defence alongside Jürgen Gelsdorf, made 92 Bundesliga appearances and scored 14 goals along the way. The reliable penalty taker, who scored eight goals from the spot for Bayer 04, will always have a place in the history of our club for two events. On the first matchday in the 1979/80 season, Demuth converted a penalty on 62 minutes for the final score of 3-1 to Bayern Munich at the Olympic Stadium in Munich and thus became our first Bundesliga goalscorer. In addition, he was the first Bayer 04 player to score the Goal of the Month as voted for on Sportschau. In February 1980, the Sportschau audience voted his flying header against MSV Duisburg as the best goal.

Didi's time under the Bayer Cross ended four years later. His next club was Kickers Offenbach where he was unable to prevent the newly promoted club going down so he moved back to his hometown a year later to play at the Millerntor in the second division. Demuth went up and down from the second tier with the Hamburg club over the next four years.

Didi began his second career in football as a coach in 1990. First he was in charge of the second team at FC St. Pauli And in the following years he again and again moved between the head and assistant coaching posts at different clubs. In January 1999 his path, as an assistant coach alongside head coach Willi Reimann, took him back to the second division side from Millerntor. Just over a year later, in March 2000, he was in sole charge of the team and he saved FC St. Pauli from relegation from Bundesliga 2 and, out of the blue, he then achieved promotion a season later. The Hamburg side battled against relegation from the start in the Bundesliga and in the end had to accept the bitter drop to the second tier. But the Demuth team went into the history books on 6 February 2002. A Wednesday match under floodlights, unforgettable for every St. Pauli fan, saw a battling St. Pauli team beat the reigning champions of Germany and World Club Cup winners Bayern Munich 2-1. Since then Pauli have been known as the "World Club Cup winners beaters."

After relegation, Dietmar left the club after two heavy defeats in Bundesliga 2 in the summer of 2002 and he went on to be the head coach at a lot of different clubs in the following years. That took him to Ghana and to SV Babelsberg where his team played the Werkself in the first round of the DFB Pokal in the 2009/10 season. His side only lost 1-0 in a tight game.

After further posts at lower league clubs the coach Dietmar Demuth has had a quieter time in recent years. He can now look back at a very successful time in football and this year he is 70 years old in January.

Dear Didi, I wish you all the best on your birthday. Have a great time and stay fit and well.