English

Any Given Weekend is a blog primarily following the ups and downs of my favourite football club, Borussia Dortmund, playing in Germany’s highest division, the 1. Bundesliga. And there have been quite a few ups and downs, in recent years as well as in this season. After nearly going bankrupt in 2004, the club is now back on a sound financial footing. On the pitch though, we are still lacking stability and this has led to successive mid-table finishes since 2004.

This season, 2007/08, has proven the point: it has been a complete rollercoaster so far. After a dismal start with a 3-1 home defeat to freshly-promoted MSV Duisburg and a 4-1 beating by fierce local rivals FC Schalke 04, the team bagged three straight wins. The last one of those was especially memorable: 11 magical minutes were enough to secure a 3-0 home win against Werder Bremen who arguably have been playing the best football in Germany in recent years.

But then it all went wrong again. While the team still showed a decent performance in Berlin despite losing 3-2, the next two games were complete rubbish. A 3-0 loss at home to Hamburg was followed by a 3-1 defeat at Karlsruhe, another team just promoted from 2. Bundesliga. The players decided to boycott the press and have since declined requests for interviews (though this ‚ban‘ is to be lifted on Wednesday after the cup tie against Frankfurt).

The next match, against geographically close neighbours Bochum, was poor from both sides, but Dortmund (or shorter: BVB) managed to win it 2-1 despite being down to ten men for most of the 2nd half. After the EURO qualifier break and with some injured players returning, we held UEFA Cup participants Bayer Leverkusen to a 2-2 draw at their place. Our best striker, Mladen Petric, scored a goal with award quality. And just yesterday, the team showed an impressive performance at home against everybody’s title favourites, Bayern Munich. It ended as a goalless draw, but we deserved to win it really! 😉

So what’s next? Finally some continuity in performance and effort? In Bundesliga, BVB is lying in 11th place right now (29 Oct 2007), but we have already played all the ‚big‘ teams. Nevertheless, we better make sure we win that cup tie on Wednesday…

While I’m mainly writing in German on this blog, I will try to keep all the interested readers from abroad up-to-date with (more or less) regular English round-ups. If you like to comment, you can obviously do so in English.

For updates, click on „English updates“ in the sidebar (filed under „Kategorien“)!