H ermann Hesse was born in Baden-Württemberg, the future ground
zero for German football hipsters, and even though he didn't leave
behind any explicit musings on the game, he 110% understood the
pressing need of setting your stall out early doors. "A magic dwells in
each beginning, protecting us, telling us how to live," he wrote in Steps,
his most famous poem, in 1941.
After much anguished ruminating about the threat from the Premier
League moneybags, the suffocating dominance of Bayern Munich and
proliferation of no-name-no-fans teams, the Bundesliga was firmly
banking on the enchantment of the new (season), too, at the weekend.
Tim Bendzko, a world-famous singer/
songwriter in one of the 210 countries
broadcasting the opening game at the
Allianz Arena live on Friday night, was
singing the national anthem for novelty
effect. Instead of hapless former northern
powerhouse Hamburger SV (5-0 losers in
Fröttmaning a year ago), the league had cleverly cast hapless former
northern powerhouse Werder Bremen to provide much more resistance
against the champions this time around.
And Bayern Munich, perhaps themselves bored with constantly winning
the league under the freakishly brilliant Pep Guardiola, have kindly
installed the much-more-easy-going Carlo Ancelotti, to give the
opposition a bit of a chance. Carletto's way, history books have shown,
tends to lead to the Champions League but relatively rarely to league
titles.
The illusion of the new soon revealed itself as such, however, as Viktor
Skripnik's Green and Whites were destroyed 6-0 with frightening ease.
As an advertisement for the competition, the result did not exactly send
the desired message, even if Werder Bremen was briefly trending in the
US on Twitter. The league president, Reinhard Rauball, professed
himself "shocked" by the docility of the visitors in the non-contest, and
Skripnik admitted that his team had made him feel like "the arse of the
world". Him and his coaches had been "embarrassed" on the bench, the
Ukrainian admitted.
Two competitive defeats (in the cup and the league) into the season, the
46-year-old has already been forced to employ some hefty endgame
rhetoric. The home game against Augsburg after the international break
will be "a final" he claimed. For him personally, it might well be.
The distinct lack of originality scoreline-
wise aside, Bayern's stroll to the top of the
table at least fed into the media narrative in
Bavaria. Relieved from the "shackles of
Guardiola", TV pundit/frustrated coach
Mehmet Scholl explained, Bayern's players
have rediscovered the joy of attacking
football, without all those pesky, minute instructions.
There is an element of truth in that, of course, but a less self-serving, less
reactionary analysis would probably uncover that the much-vaunted
freedom in Bayern's game is largely the function of more space ahead of
them, which is being found at the expense of ceding possession in spells.
Werder in any case were not in the slightest bit able to put the tweaked
system to the test.
The next day at Frankfurt, it was business as usual for Schalke too. The
Royal Blues have a new coach in Markus Weinzierl, a new sporting
director in Christian Heidel and a bunch of interesting new signings. But
on the whole, it was a startling case of deja vu, all over again.
Süddeutsche Zeitung's long-suffering S04 correspondent Philipp Selldorf
had flashbacks to a litany of mishaps and accidents past as "the familiar
weirdness" of the visitors' passivity in the opening 20 minutes allowed
Eintracht's Alex Meier to give his side the lead. Schalke did wake up to
create some decent chances towards the end of the match, when the
Chelsea-loanee Michael Hector was sent off for the second time in as
many games, but the hopes of a fresh start dissipated into the hot August
air and left Schalke in a sticky patch. They will host Bayern next.
The new and possibly improved Borussia Dortmund, meanwhile, showed
that the pre-season hype has some justification, a slight wobble against
Mainz 05 notwithstanding. Two goals from Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang
saw the Gabon international (almost) keep pace with the hat-trick hero
Robert Lewandowski, and by and large Thomas Tuchel was pleased with
the progress shown.
Narrow-minded fears of a "loss of identity", as expressed by some ultras,
seem as unfounded as concerns about the time it might take for the team
to gel in the wake of all the changes. With players such Ousmane
Dembélé and André Schürrle up front, Dortmund are certainly fast
enough to catch Bayern at the top. Only their endurance (and solidity at
the back) is still in question.
So far so fairly expected, you might say, but matchday one did offer
some shiny, genuine newness in other quarters. At the Borussia Park, for
example, Gladbach v Leverkusen didn't just live up to its fourth-v-third-
from-last-season billing but exceeded expectations with a surprising
punchline: the Foals' superb counterattacking and impressive depth
suggested that they might be better placed than Roger Schmidt's hard-
pressing Werkself to make an assault on the duopoly at the top.
Goals from André Hahn and Lars Stindl helped to overcome the visitors
in a high-quality game that showcased just how far German club football
has come in recent years.
Similarly enjoyable, albeit on a slightly
lower plane technically, was Hoffenheim's
2-2 draw with RB Leipzig on Sunday. Few
people would have watched it live on
German TV – a self-deprecating fan banner
greeting "the four viewers on Sky" might
not have been too far off the truth – but the
game between the billionaire-sponsored
village club and the Red Bull-owned newcomers was entertaining enough
despite being rather deficient in terms of historical resonance or, if you
will, authenticity. "We showed that we can enrich the league," the RB
coach Ralph Hasenhüttl said after the successful debut in the top flight.
No pun intended, to be sure.
The Bundesliga's most disliked club did not just win a point yesterday,
they also struck a small blow for the league as a whole by signing the
Nottingham Forest winger Oliver Burke from underneath the noses of a
host of Premier League clubs, some of whom had frantically upped their
wage offers as news of the 19-year-old's medical broke, according to
Kicker. Late transfer-window raids were supposed to go the other way
this summer.
Leipzig's arrival as a super-charged force in waiting cannot possibly
mark the beginning of the Bundesliga's financial fightback against the all
powerful English, not even the beginning of the beginning. But maybe
the envy/horror their inevitable ascent to the top is bound to generate can
at least temporarily end overblown worries that the league has lost its
capacity to surprise and excite in middle-age. Matchday one already
showed there will be enough going on here, both familiar and new, to
keep the attention.
Results: Bayern 6-0 Bremen; Frankfurt 1-0 Schalke; Augsburg 0-2
Wolfsburg; HSV 1-1 Ingolstadt; Dortmund 2-1 Mainz; Gladbach 2-1
Leverkusen; Hertha 2-1 Freiburg; Hoffenheim 2-2 Leipzig.
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