Bundesliga Matchday 33: A Tale of two Cities

By: Jan | May 15th, 2007

Rivalries are elementary ingredients to every good football league and in the part of Germany where I live they are impossible to avoid. The Rhine-Ruhr Area (within North Rhine-Westphalia) is an agglomeration of cities on a relatively small space that produced a considerable number of Bundesliga clubs. Most if not all of them share a rivalry or at least show some signs of disapprovement for each other. Two of those clubs that cultivate a particularly fierce feud are Borussia Dortmund and Schalke 04. The clash of the two is referred to as Revierderby (District Derby) and always generates a lot of attention in the run-up to the match and sometimes memorable moments or results in the aftermath. Yet, the hype surrounding last weekends fixture was unprecedented. What has already been one of the most popular derbies in German football was without further ado promoted to the status of mother of all derbies by the press. This had all to do with the fact that Schalke 04 had the chance to make a giant step towards their first championship title in 49 years or even win it should Stuttgart and Bremen slip. And winning it in what Schalke fans like to dub “The Forbidden City” could have been the icing on the cake. Dortmund on the other hand was hoping to give their fans some form of salvation for a messed up season by denying Schalke the title. And they possibly did exactly that…

Ebi Smolarek after scoring the decisive second goal for Dortmund Over 80.000 in the stadium in Dortmund and another 60.000 Schalke fans who went to their home ground to watch the match on giant screens witnessed how an aggressive Dortmund side put up one of their better performances to beat a surprisingly toothless and uninspired Schalke 2:0. German international Christoph Metzelder who played his last home game for Dortmund (leaving them for Real Madrid this summer) set up the goals for Alexander Frei (44th min) and Ebi Smolarek (85 min). And Schalke? Well, Manuel Neuer pulled off some great saves and that was mostly it. The following stats tell one side of the story: successful tackles 62% vs 27%, balls won 65 vs 24, interceptions 13 vs 7. The lack of creativity which should have been provided by Brazilian playmaker Lincoln completes the picture. Meanwhile VfB Stuttgart took the pole-position through a hard-earned win over VfL Bochum in which they had to come from behind twice and rely on a world class save by Timo Hildebrand to keep the lead. Werder Bremen crashed out of the title race by putting up a similarly desolate performance as Schalke and lost to Eintracht Frankfurt 1:2.

The German word for choker has been Bayer Leverkusen for a long time and a good reason. They were perennial second place finishers during the late 90s and you might also mention their Champions League final defeat against Real Madrid in 2002 to support the argument. But Schalke are on a good way to claim Leverkusen’s title. They choked in 2001, in 2005 and look set to loose it again in 2007. There were a lot of people who would have been very pleased for Schalke to finally win the title again after all those years. The club is enjoying and nurturing an aura of being different from the rest. Some of it is true, the other bit is good PR. To read more about Schalke you might check out the following slightly rose-tinted blog entry from the Guardian sportblog: 145,000 see ‘German Newcastle’ blow it. Well, it is not over yet. There are still 90 minutes left in this season and Stuttgart could theoretically loose or draw their home match against Energie Cottbus. Both scenarios would leave Schalke with a chance to snatch the title. The problem is, that Cottbus no longer has any ambitions for this season. They escaped relegation, have no chance to play internationally and aren’t on bad terms with Stuttgart. On the other hand, this season hasn’t been short of surprises either.

I ignored some important matches of this weeks matchday. Two of which resulted in the basically official relegation of Alemannia Aachen and FSV Mainz 05 to the 2. Bundesliga. Another one secured Bayer Leverkusen a place in the UEFA Cup. I will probably get back to this on a different occasion.