Matchday 6: Diego Delight

By: Jan | September 24th, 2007

Diego and Hugo Almeida Matchday 7 is merely a day away, as the Bundesliga heads into its first English Week. This term describes a week featuring both weekend and midweek fixtures in the Bundesliga. Something that is common in England and uncommon in Germany. So I gotta hurry with my posts.

I’ll focus all my attention on the match between Werder Bremen and VfB Stuttgart. Angela already provided an in depth analysis of Bayern’s match against Karlsruhe on Sunday over at the Bayern Munich Offside. Berlin played at home against Dortmund, and since Steven over at the Dortmund Offside is probably still struggling to come to terms with the result, let me just tell you that Berlin won it 3-2 moving them to second place in the table. Which is not a bad result considering that Berlin was dubbed a relegation candidate by some pundits prior to the season. Then we got the first sacked coach of the season as well, who can at least claim to have outlived Jose Mourinho by a few days. And Petrik Sander’s fate in Cottbus seems to be a small scale copy of the soap opera in London as well. Raphael Honigstein over at the Guardian sportblog and Chris over at Bundesliga Talk share their views on the case. And now on to the most entertaining match of last weekend.

After the first fifteen minutes of matchday 6 action in the Bundesliga on Saturday, the majority of the fans had yet to celebrate a single goal. The Friday fixture between Bochum and Frankfurt hadn’t produced any goals either. Those following the match in Bremen, were already treated to four goals in the meantime. Including two goals by Hugo Almeida scored within 44 seconds, making it the fastest brace in Bundesliga history. The match couldn’t keep up this frantic scoring pace, and it wasn’t until the 89th minute that Diego put the finishing touches to the result, by making it 4-1 with a long range effort. Still a highly enjoyable match, especially thanks to yet another great performance by Diego, who currently is the be all and end all of Werder Bremen. If he comes back jet-legged from Boston, Bremen looks poor and once he’s match fit, Bremen looks competitive against Real Madrid. I’m exaggerating a bit here. But still, I can’t help but wonder what Bremen would be playing like if they somehow escaped an injury list worth a complete starting XI. It may also be a bit early to assess whether Diego is playing even better than last season. But the absence of Frings has at least proven, that he can take responsibility and lead a team, even during tense matches. All of this tempted Klaus Allofs to offer Diego a new contract, bumping the expiration date up to 2011 and his yearly salary from €2,5m to €4m. Diego was happy to agree and the fans were happy when they heard the news. I guess it’s unlikely that Diego will actually stay in Bremen until 2011, but it’s at least making it a bit more expensive to buy him out of his contract. I guess, we will see a couple of rich clubs knocking on Bremen’s next summer nonetheless.

Things aren’t so rosy in Stuttgart at the moment. The team has quality and the team very easily gives matches away. I haven’t followed Stuttgart close enough this season to make a guess what exactly is going wrong. At least in the match against Bremen they weren’t just the weaker team, but they were also disallowed a perfectly regular goal by Roberto Hilbert, who otherwise would have closed the gap to one goal. Mario Gomez also came as close as you can get to score. If one of those two efforts had ended up on the scoresheet, the match might have taken a different course.

Here are highlights with all goals and the second video includes extended highlights of the second half with more Diego goodness including a great bicycle kick.