[Soccer] Dynamo Dresden vs. Alemannia Aachen

It's getting cold here. Autumn leafs are getting brown on the trees, the sky is all cloudy and if it is clear, this leads to even colder winds blowing through the streets. So how to become warm on a monday evening? Some friends and me tried the Dynamo way: Alemannia Aachen were in town and playing against Dynamo Dresden yesterday evening. That's why we went to the stadium to have some jumping and singing experience once again.

The game started unexpected: the Dresden team was pushed into a defensive position and did not often get out of it allover the game. Aachen attacked one wave after the other, supported by many bad mistakes made by Dynamo players. One could argue that these mistakes happened, because three or four of the players were only in because they played a position of other injured players - but even then you should not play that bad if you plan to stay in the Second League this year again.

First 30 minutes saw many attacks, some of them seriously bringing us near a heart attack, but up to then they did not bring the effort they should. In minute 34 however, Aachen scored a goal after kicking the ball on to the goal 3 times in a row without hitting it. No one of us was really surprised, we just stood there without talking - maybe even more shocked by the way the game went than by the goal itself. Some relief 2 minutes later: Witold Wawrzyczek (that's the guy with the name no one could spell by the beginning of this season - but our fans' Polish has improved at least a little bit over the time.) hammered the ball from 25 metres into Aachen's goal. 1-1 at halftime - we went to drink some mulled wine (did i mention that it is getting cold here?) and tried to forget the soccer disease we saw in the last 45 minutes.

Half two started as the first one ended: Aachen rushing and attacking, Dynamo in a defensive position which they were obviously not prepared to take. Another good attack lead to the 1-2 goal in minute 51. Some minutes later the Dresden players started to wake up. The fan curve hat been yelling "We want to see you fight" for minutes, now it seemed our players had understood. Unfortunately they were too nervous now to get something really done even though they tried to fight. The end of the game saw two of our players leaving the field because of foul plays, Dynamo's co-trainer was sent to the tribune because of shouting at the referee multiple times. No wonder, Aachen scored a goal for the 1-3 final result later that game.

Many of the referee's decisions during the last twenty minutes of the game were not quite easy to understand for the fans, many of them got very angry. However, these decisions did not change the game - we already had lost in the first 70 minutes. The defeat was okay, it even would have been okay if Aachen had made five or six goals. The referee only made the game taste even more bitter. (Greetings to the Bitterman in Brazil!). If Dynamo keeps on playing like this, we are going to face terribly dark times. 4 games at home are left until christmas, three of them are derbies against the teams from Aue, Rostock and Cottbus. Currently we are number two in East Germany - if we want to keep this place, we should win at least two of these games.

Besides, yesterday's game had a main sponsor: T-Mobile, a German mobile company. When we entered the stadium, we saw all the seats covered with magenta balloons, before the game started, some management guy of T-Mobile stood on the field and tried to convince us that magenta is a great color in combination with our traditional black and yellow. (We were not convinced afterwards.) But T-Mobile had spent a lot of money for this: they had hired the East-German band "Die Puhdys" to perform three songs before the game and they had a lottery running, were they gave away 1.000 prepaid handies. (I didn't win one.) The Ultra fan block presented a transparent shouting at T-Mobile and its commercial ideas, but this transparent was soon removed by the stadium security. That's what pissed off many of the fans if they were not already in rage because of this commercial attitude. My pragmatic opinion, although I know that many others disagree about it: Dynamo needs all the money they can get and if this means to have some terrible balloons at a game or to sell the stadium name - just do it.