They had been away for 11 years, but the forgotten club of Germany’s football heartlands fully enjoyed their gala day
They streamed down the streets in blue and white, gravitating to the Castroper Strasse where trams drop right outside the Ruhrstadion and the smell of grilling sausages hits you as soon as the double doors open. “The euphoria was palpable throughout the city,” said Thomas Reis. They had waited for this and how they deserved it.
Bochum is a city of 365,000 people hiding in plain sight in football’s landscape, in the German game’s most teeming region. On a wider scale, VfL Bochum are destined to be the forgotten of North Rhine-Westphalia, squeezed into the space between the bigger and brasher Borussia Dortmund to the east and Schalke to the west. Not on Saturday, though. This was their day, a day they had been waiting for and not just since their promotion and title win at the end of a season when they were again treated by many as an afterthought to Hamburg’s latest failure to return to the big time.
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