| 24.09.2009 |
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| After a relatively uneventful first round, the German Cup finally returned to its usual wacky form on Wednesday with no fewer than five major upsets. Hamburg are hanging their heads in shame after going out to third-division Osnabrueck, Leverkusen failed against second-division Kaiserslautern, and Wolfsburg slipped up in Cologne. The two top teams in the table and last year’s league champs all became history within the space of a couple hours, and if you’d had a decent-sized bet on that constellation of results, you could probably start thinking about early retirement. A bit earlier in the evening Freiburg and Hertha also lost to second-division clubs Augsburg and 1860 Munich respectively. I followed exactly 30 seconds of the action. Waiting in line at a broiled chicken stand, I peeped through the window of a betting shop and saw that Hertha were down 2-nil in the 65th minute. Mindful of the harm Berlin’s last loss did to one of my favourite internal organs (see below), I thought ‘Well that’s it for Coach Favre’ and decided I’d seen enough. It turned out to be a match full of irony. 1860 was Hertha’s main rival when they last fought relegation in 2004 – Berlin stayed up thanks to a narrow draw in a head-to-head duel, in which 1860 missed a late penalty. And as I found out in Thursday’s papers, Munich almost did Hertha another favour, conceding two late goals to send the match in extra time. In the additional 30 minutes, Hertha apparently did everything but put the ball in the net. The man who thwarted them was goalkeeper Gabor Kiraly – the same mad Hungarian who used to mind the posts here in Berlin. 1860 then went on to win the penalty shoot-out. All things considered, not a bad result. Berlin never wins the Cup, and no one expects Hertha players to be able to do something as difficult as put the ball into a 7.3-meter-wide goal, when there’s a little guy who can use his hands standing on the touchline. As an astute fan at offside.com put it, give Hertha five penalty shoot-outs against England and they’d probably lose all five – though the fourth one might be close. So the absence of real regrets that Berlin blew it in this fashion probably saved Favre’s job. Hamburg, Wolfsburg and Leverkusen, though, will be kicking themselves for squandering realistic chances of hoisting the easiest bit of silverware a Bundesliga club can win. |
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