Slovakian football is mourning 1962 FIFA World Cup finalist Jozef Adamec, who died on Monday aged 76.
Voted his nation’s second best player of the century after Ján Popluhár, Adamec was part of the Czechoslovakia team that reached the 1962 World Cup final and was a prolific goalscorer in a career mainly spent at Spartak Trnava. In a long coaching career he also spent three years in charge of Slovakia.
Adamec, nicknamed ‘Hatrlo’, helped Trnava win five Czechoslovakian titles in six years between 1967/68 and 1972/73, finishing as league top scorer four times as well as reaching the 1968/69 European Champion Clubs’ Cup semi-finals and the last eight on two further occasions. During his military sevice in the early 1960s he also won the title twice with Dukla Praha, also playing for Slovan Bratislava and Austria’s Slovan Wien (now Slovan Hütteldorfer).
He was capped times by Czechoslovakia, going to the 1970 World Cup as well as 1962. His team lost that World Cup final in Chile to Brazil but in June 1968 inspired a 3-2 friendly win against the same nation in front of 60,000 fans in Bratislava. In that game Adamec became only the second man to score a hat-trick against Brazil after Poland’s Ernst Wilimowski in 1938.
In his final season at Trnava, 1976/77, he was also assistant coach and for the next three years was player-manager at Slovan Wien. Adamec went on to coach many teams, including Slovakia between 1999 and 2002, before ending his long career with a fourth spell at the Trnava helm in 2008.
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