Glasses theft and stinky fingers: The wild show of unrestrained Jens Lehmann

“How do you know in Cologne that it’s Thursday? Lukas Podolski comes to training for the first time this week.” Udo Lattek found little to appreciate the performance of the homecomer from FC Bayern Munich in the 2009/10 season. But the former champion coach in the league was not alone in this. Podolski’s return was initially enthusiastically celebrated in Cologne, but his goal tally left a lot to be desired. After he scored on matchday 5, FC fans had to wait until matchday 25 for the eventual world champion to score again. Incidentally, Udo Lattek actually won the soccer award of the year 2010. However, not with the humorous sentence about Podolski, but about FC in general: “There’s always such a great atmosphere in the Cologne stadium, it’s really only the team that bothers you.”

An almost unbelievable story had played out between soccer professional Diego Klimowicz and referee Lutz Wagner in recent years. Now she experienced her climax in this season. When Wagner pulled out the red card on the afternoon of December 5, it was the fourth time since August 13, 2005 that the referee sent Klimowicz out of the field. Bochum’s captain Marcel Maltritz was just as astonished as his team-mate: “One might think that Diego once stole his wife.” But Diego Klimowicz did not see things quite so calmly. “It’s not normal. He has something against me,” he speculated, boiling with anger.

“Does he look good?”

Lutz Wagner showed his romantic side just a few days after being sent off and sent the Argentinian an offer of reconciliation via the media: “At the end of the season, the Bundesliga will be over for both of us. Then I would like to invite Mr. Klimowicz to my house. A glass of wine can definitely release old tensions.” And the referee’s wife, who has been happily married for over twenty years, was already looking forward to an evening with the South American. Curiously, she asked: “I don’t know Klimowicz. Does he look good? If so, I’ll have to deal with it …”

At his very first press conference as the new coach of VfL Bochum, former Bundesliga professional Heiko Herrlich presented himself as a fine rhetorician: “Football is like nature. The strong animals quickly eat away the weak animals. And when I look at the table, I see I think we’re rather weak animals at the moment. And since I don’t like being bitten and prefer to bite back, I’ll try to motivate the team to bite back from now on, preferably next Sunday.”

And when the journalists wanted to know what the impression of the team was like after the first training session, Heiko Herrlich said very subtly: “The potential is there. Compared to the animal world, I see the willingness of the team to come out of a big, fast cat to become a lion!” After a few weeks it was already clear that VfL Bochum presented itself more like this: “It shouldn’t be like bullfighting, where the stupid bull always runs into the red rag.” Herrlich didn’t see the end of the season in Bochum.

Jens Lehmann turns freely

VfB keeper Jens Lehmann once again set the bar very high for future goalkeeping generations in his last Bundesliga season. With a series of extraordinary actions, he not only made headlines in the league, but also made a significant contribution to the entertainment value of the season. Lehmann deliberately climbed onto the feet of Mainz Bancé, stole the glasses of an FSV supporter on the same day, threw Hoffenheim’s Ibisevic shoe high on his goal net, gave the VfL Wolfsburg fans the stinky finger, peed during a Champions League game behind an advertising board and finally got into a fight with a ball boy. In the 1-0 defeat of Stuttgart in Hanover, he did not throw the ball into the hands of the approaching VfB keeper, as expected, but over the head. Lehmann then lost his balance and stumbled against the boards.

The ball boy then justified himself with a shrug: “I was just doing my job. I threw the ball up at him and it then came down on his head. Lehmann then asked me: ‘What’s the shit?'” The 40-year-old VfB -Goalkeeper didn’t want to calm down even after the game was over. He stood angrily in front of the TV cameras and said into the microphones: “We make mistakes, we are confronted with mistakes made by other people. The ball boys play for time. You have to live with that in the Bundesliga. The culture of the Bundesliga has me the most today playing time and cheating. I have to go now. I have to go home, raise my children well so they behave properly!”

“That was totally crazy!”

A curious encounter took place on the 16th matchday in Mönchengladbach. In the 5:3 of Borussia over Hannover 96, the guests scored a total of three own goals. Constant Djakpa scored once and Karim Haggui twice into his own net. Hanover coach Andreas Bergmann said afterwards with a smile: “We score six goals and lose. That’s unbelievable.”

Also a bizarre action: In front of the assembled team, Bayern coach Louis van Gaal drew blank in the cabin below, as striker Luca Toni reported: “The coach wanted to make it clear to us that he can replace any player – no matter what his name is. Because he eggs He dropped his pants to show it. I’ve never seen anything like that, it was crazy. I didn’t see much though because I wasn’t in the front row!”

The boy from Bochum in the FC Bayern jersey, Hermann Gerland, was particularly happy about the Munich championship: “You know, I’m an obsessed footballer, but I’ve never won a title. And now I was there when the most renowned club Germany celebrates a triumph. I thought about my days as a professional in Bochum, when my mother had to wash my training clothes, and we players could choose between soup and dessert at lunch. It was either-or, nobody got both I always wanted to be able to say: someone from Bochum played a small part in winning the German championship, and now I was standing there on the balcony and was overwhelmed by the feeling: Boy, you up here – it’s done all worth it!”