“25 goals against the terror,” cheered Bild on Sunday after the first two days of highly targeted on-field strikes symbolically pummelled the forces of darkness. Bundesliga players were so intent on fulfilling their patriotic duty that four – including Borussia Dortmund’s maestro of nonchalance, Mats Hummels – went as far as putting the ball into their own net. But own goals, too, count against terror and they should not detract from a victory for normalcy.
With Schalke playing well and losing to Bayern (3-1), Dortmund getting beaten by their bogey team HSV (3-1) for the fifth time in seven games and Alex Zorniger’s VfB Stuttgart collapsing under the weight of the impossible demands of their half-baked pressing game (4-0 at home to Augsburg), it was very much business as usual. In another commendable show of defiance, a few Bayern and VfL Bochum ultras didn’t let last week’s horror and the resulting general queasiness get in the way of a good old brainless punch-up before the game at the Veltins-Arena. Almost 200 of them were arrested after attacks on Schalke fans. “We wanted to say hello,” one Bayern ultra blog explained, “but because there were considerably more [Schalke] people there, we beat a retreat”. There were also problems in Hannover, where 80 Werder fans caused trouble at the station and skirmishes at Gladbach’s 2-1 win over Hannover with away supporters.
Hertha BSC’s toils in picturesque circumstances, in a snowy Olympic stadium on Sunday, may not have been as exciting but they eventually got the job done, the way most jobs get done in Berlin – by relying on somebody else to do it. The home side did not muster a single shot on target in 90 minutes and only one shot vaguely in the direction of Oliver Baumann’s goal but the TSG Hoffenheim defender Eugen Polanski thankfully lent a helping head to divert a free-kick from Marvin Plattenhardt over the line.
Hertha are still unfeasibly well-placed, fourth in the table after their 1-0 win. Good explanations for their superb run remain hard to come by but they have by now undoubtedly forced all the naysayers to face the music. Theirs is a football that ticks along to the super-minimalist tunes in Berghain’s Panorama Bar – nothing really happens for most of the time, for hours and hours, but the effect is weirdly hypnotic and compelling. The former Hertha coach Huub Stevens, now entrusted to save Hoffenheim from a first-ever relegation from the top flight, would have appreciated the handiwork of his counterpart Pal Dardai. Hertha are awkward to play against and make the absolute most of the chances they do not create. They have scored only 18 times in 13 games.
Their obduracy pales into insignificance compared with that of Der Kaiser, however. Franz Beckenbauer, one of the key figures of the scandal engulfing Germany’s totally above-board win of the 2006 World Cup vote, at last broke his silence on Saturday to tell Süddeutsche Zeitung that he, unfortunately, had nothing substantial to say on the matter. The non-message was delivered with typical charm by the 70-year-old over the course of a three-hour interview and left the four seasoned reporters utterly defeated. “I blindly signed any papers they asked me to sign,” Beckenbauer said in relation to his signature on a contract that offered services and favours to Jack Warner’s Concacaf before the vote in July 2000. “You can ask [former finance director] Karl Hopfner about my 15 days as president at Bayern. He was in charge of day-to-day business. You don’t believe I read even a single agreement or document, do you? You don’t believe it but that’s how it is. If I trust somebody, I always signed blindly.”
It is all almost funny, this ignorance shtick, but ultimately just terribly disheartening. Beckenbauer, “the least German of all Germans” (Süddeutsche’s Holger Gertz), a man whose lightness of touch and elegance elevated him over his hard-working but dour peers, has come up with the same stereotypical Teutonic excuses of the past in the wake of Fifa’s collapse: a) “I only did as I was told”; b) “I don’t remember”; c) “I only did what everybody else was doing because”; d) “the evil system at the time left me no other choice”.
Meanwhile the German FA is facing a bit of a structural crisis. The 21 regional federations representing amateur football in Germany want the FA treasurer, Reinhard Grindel, to become Wolfgang Niersbach’s successor, but the Bundesliga clubs are less keen on the Christian Democrat politician (he’s uploaded a lovely video of him looking at stuff on his constituency in Lower Saxony but please mute it first). The clubs would prefer the federation got to the bottom of the 2006 scandal before a new president is voted in. The BVB CEO, Hans-Joachim Watzke, suggested on Monday that Grindel might share the office with a league representative for a few years.
As if there was not enough disunity on the horizon, the St Pauli CEO, Andreas Rettig, has formally requested that clubs that don’t adhere to the ‘50+1’ rule that stipulates the control of voting rights by club members should be excluded from the central TV marketing pool. Leverkusen (owned by Bayer), Wolfsburg (Volkswagen) and Hoffenheim (Dietmar Hopp) would be affected, along with Hannover from 2017 (president Martin Kind and other investors are poised to take over the club in a couple of years).
It is not difficult to imagine how well Rettig’s proposition has gone down with the clubs in question. Rudi Völler, Bayer’s sporting director, called it a “populist” demand and said Rettig was being “the clever little pig” (from the fairytale). There’s no realistic chance St Pauli will get anywhere with that idea – the clubs are expressly allowed to circumvent the rules by the league – but the debate about the so-called “plastic clubs” and the rise of owner-financed teams will only intensify as a result.
Results: HSV 3-1 Dortmund, Köln 0-0 Mainz, Stuttgart 0-4 Augsburg, Wolfsburg 6-0 Bremen, Gladbach 2-1 Hannover, Frankfurt 1-3 Leverkusen, Schalke 1-3 Bayern, Hertha 1-0 Hoffenheim, Ingolstadt 3-1 Darmstadt.
