Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger explains why most German fans were not quite as upset by the result in Munich as their English counterparts would have liked
All German Sunday papers have sold out at Munich’s main railway station, that’s why everybody on the train to Frankfurt is now hunched over the Observer or the Sunday Times. Or maybe it’s because, in this coach, they’re all English. Apart from me. The two men from Leicester at my table have immersed themselves in pieces on a cricketer called Keith Parsons and the Ryder Cup, respectively. The six or eight fans from near Liverpool behind me are discussing with gusto an article that mentions “drunken English football fans”, “baton-wielding German riot police” and “blood pouring from wounds”.
One of them is singing “I’m English till I die” while producing can after can from his obviously bottomless bag. He’s got “No Surrender” tattoed on his calf. And he’s sociable. Later, he’ll offer me an exclusive interview about people he keeps referring to as my “boys”. At first I think he’s talking about the team, then I gather he means the group of German Nazi thugs I had seen engaging in silly running battles the afternoon before. They are, I’m being informed, “all cowards”, having thrown bottles at “normal people” instead of squaring up to those who “were waiting for them”. Our pleasant conversation comes to an end when I have to tell him that, sorry, these people are not my boys.
He and his mates stroll to the bar, joined by one of the Leicester pair. When the latter returns, 45 minutes later, he tells us there are quite a few German fans in the bar, too, and that everybody is singing together while drinking the place dry in a hurry. I ask him what the Germans are saying about the game. He hesitates. “Not much. They were very quiet yesterday, too,” he says. “You know, what I don’t like about the Germans is that when they win, they tell everybody about it. But when they lose they pretend it didn’t happen and don’t say anything.”
That starts me thinking. Is this true? German football has just been through two years of almost sadomasochist self-destruction. The national team was labelled “the worst of all time”, the players were ridiculed as “fried sausages”, the various managers were dubbed incompetent (and a would-be one, Christoph Daum, “insane”). The quality of the Bundesliga was criticised, the youth set-up denounced. Some pundits said we had disgraced two tournaments, others claimed it would be better if we didn’t get to the World Cup, so as not to embarrass ourselves again.
True, the Völler reign had brought back a semblance of sanity, but of course only until September 1. Dreadful! said the largest tabloid, calling the game “a lesson we can hopefully learn from”. Kicker asked its readers: “Are we back to rock bottom?”(60 per cent said no, 40 per cent yes). The country’s biggest sports weekly spoke of “shame”, printed an “open letter to the failures” and published a column by Günter Netzer headlined Now we have to fear everyone.
I mean, who’s quiet here? But maybe the man from Leicester didn’t mean the press but the fans. Was he, in his own way, as disappointed in the German fans as his fellow-countryman with the “No Surrender” tattoo was in the German hooligans – for somehow not responding in style or according to unwritten rules?
Like I said, I had been on Munich’s main square on the afternoon of the game, when the so-called “riots” began. A young man to my right suddenly said: “Don’t worry. This is nothing. I’m used to it. It’s only a problem when they start throwing things.” He was from Verona. “In Italy,” he said, “this happens before virtually every league match.” I asked him if there was fighting at internationals, and he shook his head. “Italians care for their club, not so much for the national team. When Italy win, it’s fine; when they lose, it’s bad. But not really bad.”
Which, I guess, is how most Germans feel, too. I hadn’t met a single one that day who really professed to being a “fan” of the national team. And I had been careful not to pick people from my own age group (mid-thirties). That’s because we grew up with the horror that was the 1982 World Cup (Austria v Germany, and then the Battiston incident) and have never since been able to feel sympathy for a Germany XI anyway. Still, even the older people (who grew up with the magic team of the early 1970s) or the young ones (raised on Italy 1990) were excited by the occasion, not by the prospect of seeing their team.
I should probably have told the man from Liverpool that the players aren’t “my boys”, either.
From WSC 177 November 2001. What was happening this month