Longsight-memories
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Loyal readers of this column may recall – at a stretch – last fortnight's blog on the way some Premier League obsessions are slowly creeping into the Bundesliga discourse. But a quick look at the table as well as the "it would never happen in a proper league" regulation thrashing of the weekend – Bayern's 7-0 Reiberdatschi walkover sorry SC Freiburg – makes one wonder why another, equally serious matter, one at least on a par with net spend calculations, shirt sponsorship contract values and the precise running order of a highlights show that's rather shamefully biased towards matches with actual highlights, is not discussed at far greater length in ye olde Vaterland of Fussball. We are of course talking about the secret, dark machinations of the Bundesliga fixture list.
German football supporters still – rather naively, of course – believe that the pairings are actually fabricated by an incorruptible computer on Bundesliga chief executive Christian Seiffert's desk. This almost blind faith is undoubtedly underpinned by the extremely efficient manner in which the 17 first-half of the season fixtures are simply repeated one after the other, on opposing grounds, after the winter break. This neat, objective-looking symmetry is only ever broken up in extreme circumstances, when matches are abandoned, for example. Fans of proper "big" Premier League clubs would not be fooled by this veneer of objectivity, however. They'd subject the Spielplan to the kind of rigorous, forensic analysis that can detect the true anti-insertyourteamhere bias hiding in plain sight. And they'd soon see through this season's conspiracy: it's all fixed, in a literal sense, in Bayern's favour.
Can you handle the truth? Braunschweig (in the cup). Gladbach at home. Wolfsburg, Felix Magath's jumble-sale-monstrosity, away. Zürich in the Champions League play-offs. Zürich! Chelsea Reserves (aka HSV) at home, Kaiserslautern away, Freiburg at home. Not even a Manchester United Champions League group can cram in such an absurd amount of no-hopers. No wonder Jupp Heynckes's men have scored 22 goals and conceded only one in eight games in all competitions – embarrassingly, they were still not quite good enough to avoid defeat in their curtain raiser against Gladbach. This was not so much an opening programme as an invitation to jump the queue. Of course they're top of the table, singing about the championship. Who wouldn't be in their shoes? It all smacks of a cynical ploy by the Bundesliga to stop the Bayern board banging on about a better TV deal. Uefa and Fifa are no doubt involved, too: they've patently caved in to Bayern chief executive Karl-Heinz Rummenigge's incessant demands for an improved calendar.
It's hard to believe that Mario Gomez, to name but one beneficiary, could have scored eight goals already under normal circumstances. Half of them came on Saturday, when he had little more to do than "stand in front of goal" in his words, waiting for another tap-in or a lucky deflection. Franck Ribéry, too, is looking suspiciously like the player whom Bayern Munich refused to sell, if Bayern president Uli Hoeness is to believed, "for €80m" to a Premier League club a couple of seasons ago. "I feel 100% for the first time in two years," said the Frenchman, who really did accelerate past hapless defenders like it was 2007 and scored one of his two goals with a lovely backheel. The substitute Nils Petersen completed the rout.
Heynckes, who had his doubters not long ago, looks like a genius all of a sudden, the man who has been able to fuse late-Ottmar-Hitzfeld-era rotation and defensive rigour with the attacking verve of Louis van Gaal's heydays. Everyone's having fun, even the rifts between defence and artists seem to have disappeared in the midst of all this fish-in-the-barrel-merriment. "It's great to see how pressing from the strikers unsettles teams," Gomez said, while Philipp Lahm made a point of praising the front four's back-tracking. Arjen Robben, just to be clear, wasn't on the pitch.
As a man who knows his way around the corridors of power, Rummenigge refused to buy into the hype, however. "We should file this result away very quickly, there'll be more headwind in future weeks," he said. And that must be right. Surely Villarreal will offer more in El Madrigal on Wednesday night than the mild and pleasant breeze that Freiburg produced in the Allianz Arena. The good thing for Bayern is that they've effectively got their excuses in already. Should they fail in Europe, the favouritism by Frankfurt (the Bundesliga HQ) will swiftly be declared an elaborate double-bluff. Expect something along the lines of an indignant "we were afforded a false sense of security domestically" when Rossi
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/sep/12/bayern-munich-bundesliga
They meet Schalke away on the same day we meet Everton home...fancy us to beat bayern away
German football supporters still – rather naively, of course – believe that the pairings are actually fabricated by an incorruptible computer on Bundesliga chief executive Christian Seiffert's desk. This almost blind faith is undoubtedly underpinned by the extremely efficient manner in which the 17 first-half of the season fixtures are simply repeated one after the other, on opposing grounds, after the winter break. This neat, objective-looking symmetry is only ever broken up in extreme circumstances, when matches are abandoned, for example. Fans of proper "big" Premier League clubs would not be fooled by this veneer of objectivity, however. They'd subject the Spielplan to the kind of rigorous, forensic analysis that can detect the true anti-insertyourteamhere bias hiding in plain sight. And they'd soon see through this season's conspiracy: it's all fixed, in a literal sense, in Bayern's favour.
Can you handle the truth? Braunschweig (in the cup). Gladbach at home. Wolfsburg, Felix Magath's jumble-sale-monstrosity, away. Zürich in the Champions League play-offs. Zürich! Chelsea Reserves (aka HSV) at home, Kaiserslautern away, Freiburg at home. Not even a Manchester United Champions League group can cram in such an absurd amount of no-hopers. No wonder Jupp Heynckes's men have scored 22 goals and conceded only one in eight games in all competitions – embarrassingly, they were still not quite good enough to avoid defeat in their curtain raiser against Gladbach. This was not so much an opening programme as an invitation to jump the queue. Of course they're top of the table, singing about the championship. Who wouldn't be in their shoes? It all smacks of a cynical ploy by the Bundesliga to stop the Bayern board banging on about a better TV deal. Uefa and Fifa are no doubt involved, too: they've patently caved in to Bayern chief executive Karl-Heinz Rummenigge's incessant demands for an improved calendar.
It's hard to believe that Mario Gomez, to name but one beneficiary, could have scored eight goals already under normal circumstances. Half of them came on Saturday, when he had little more to do than "stand in front of goal" in his words, waiting for another tap-in or a lucky deflection. Franck Ribéry, too, is looking suspiciously like the player whom Bayern Munich refused to sell, if Bayern president Uli Hoeness is to believed, "for €80m" to a Premier League club a couple of seasons ago. "I feel 100% for the first time in two years," said the Frenchman, who really did accelerate past hapless defenders like it was 2007 and scored one of his two goals with a lovely backheel. The substitute Nils Petersen completed the rout.
Heynckes, who had his doubters not long ago, looks like a genius all of a sudden, the man who has been able to fuse late-Ottmar-Hitzfeld-era rotation and defensive rigour with the attacking verve of Louis van Gaal's heydays. Everyone's having fun, even the rifts between defence and artists seem to have disappeared in the midst of all this fish-in-the-barrel-merriment. "It's great to see how pressing from the strikers unsettles teams," Gomez said, while Philipp Lahm made a point of praising the front four's back-tracking. Arjen Robben, just to be clear, wasn't on the pitch.
As a man who knows his way around the corridors of power, Rummenigge refused to buy into the hype, however. "We should file this result away very quickly, there'll be more headwind in future weeks," he said. And that must be right. Surely Villarreal will offer more in El Madrigal on Wednesday night than the mild and pleasant breeze that Freiburg produced in the Allianz Arena. The good thing for Bayern is that they've effectively got their excuses in already. Should they fail in Europe, the favouritism by Frankfurt (the Bundesliga HQ) will swiftly be declared an elaborate double-bluff. Expect something along the lines of an indignant "we were afforded a false sense of security domestically" when Rossi
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/sep/12/bayern-munich-bundesliga
They meet Schalke away on the same day we meet Everton home...fancy us to beat bayern away