The rustiness on display in Germany since play restarted shows how valuable regular drilling is but Dortmund v Bayern was an overtly modern game of exceptional qualityAll sporting events have their myths, the useful narratives hung on them as the flags are lowered on the final day and we have to work out what the past month, all that effort, all that emotion, all that money, was for. Remember how the 2012 Olympics in London brought us together as an open, multicultural nation inspired to a more active future? The 2006 World Cup, we were told, was about the patriotic celebration of a new Germany. And perhaps it was.However immersion in the Bundesliga over the past three weeks suggests the...
Tuesday’s match will be played in strange circumstances but a home win would fire up title race and keep the world watchingEver since the Bundesliga’s fixture list was released way back in July last year, the timing has looked delicious. For neutrals, the pair of fixtures that tend to leap out of the calendar are the confrontations between Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund. Fans have practically been able to set their watch on the arrival of the return fixture, placed within the span of a week in early April for five of the last seven seasons.In 2019-20, the return had a twist. For the first time since 2016, the second match would be played in Dortmund, more significant than it...
Erling Braut Haaland’s ability to make the game look so easy is reminiscent of the Brazilian and Russian prodigies, whose cautionary tales show talent should not be taken for grantedOf course it was Erling Braut Haaland who scored the first Bundesliga goal after the resumption. Who else could it have been? Nobody else in the modern game seems to play with such a disregard for complication. Nobody else seems to treat the basic problem of getting the ball from his foot to the back of the net with the brusque clarity of Alexander contemplating the Gordian Knot. Nobody else seems such an embodiment of tomorrow. Related: World watches with relief as Bundesliga makes a safe return – for now Related:...
A 1984 Italian movie chronicles the tail-end of the innuendo-led era and, though it has a few dated scenes, it helped set an agenda in its own wayBefore Mike Bassett, there was Oronzo Canà. The former was a fictional English football manager, played by Ricky Tomlinson, who was overpromoted into coaching the national team in a 2001 comedy that became a cult classic. The latter: a fictional Italian football manager, played by Lino Banfi, who was overpromoted into coaching a Serie A team in a 1984 comedy that went the same way.Both make up some tiny part of my cultural heritage, and yet the truth is that until recently I knew only one of them well. Neither parent actually cared...
A resumption that passed off without any disasters was greeted with a generally positive reaction by the press, though some fans are still to be convincedThere was, said Thomas Müller, “a tingling sensation because it was starting again”. Not nervousness, he was quick to stress, but an opening day of the season feeling, as the Bundesliga got back out of the blocks. This time, it was with an atmosphere of the ultimate juxtaposition – in echoey stadiums, but with the whole world watching.“Gedämpfte Freude” – muffled joy – was how the headline on Monday’s edition of Kicker put it, set across a photo of Borussia Dortmund’s players saluting a cavernous, empty Südtribune after their emphatic 4-0 Revierderby win over Schalke...