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Never Neverkusenland
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Written by Christopher Morley
Following the resumption of the Bundesliga, Bayer Leverkusen find themselves fifth in the table with 56 points from 29 games. Die Werkself (the Company Eleven, in recognition of their roots as a works team for pharmaceutical giant Bayer AG) & their supporters could be forgiven a touch of the jitters at the thought of rising three places & overtaking Borussia Dortmund in 2nd. Which seems an incredibly odd assertion, granted! But if there is any trepidation emanating from those who would normally take their seats at the currently empty BayArena on a Saturday afternoon, it is not entirely without fairly recent precedent...
Anyone who followed Graeme Souness's fairly recent spat with Paul Pogba might consider that small beer upon closer inspection of the drama he'd find himself in over the course of just one season (1995-6) in Turkey, with Galatasaray, after a year out of work. Although it could be argued that before leaving he'd helped usher in the success the club would enjoy in the early Noughties, remaining the only Süper Lig side to taste European success following a penalty shoot-out win over Arsenal in 2000's UEFA Cup final. But almost as soon as he'd signed on to take over in what their own fans dubbed “hell”, in honour of the often intimidating din of the Ali Sami Yen stadium, trouble was afoot.
After the last few weeks, I'm sure many of us are pretty fed up by now. Not only has Coronavirus led to dramatic changes to our everyday, normal lives, but it's also led to the word 'unprecedented' being used so much that I am now doing my best to use alternative phrases to make the point!
All jokes aside, the current situation is undoubtedly dramatic, and people will naturally be pining for things that we've never had to do without before. Whenever some form of normality returns, the fallout will prolong difficulties for some time, but we can only make the best of it and adapt. Football is just 1 commodity that has left a gaping hole in society, and so whilst I can no longer watch live football, I have taken the opportunity to look back at my own 'football watching career' for the 1st time...
As something of a lapsed Championship/Football Manager player, the suspension of real-world football in light of the coronavirus has given many cause to look back- in between harking to the real world of the game as it was in the early Nineties. That was my own coming of age as a fan, & conversations with an old friend brought up our old Friday night ritual of revisiting the Champ games of a similar vintage, hours spent in his study poring over what, to the non- initiated, might have looked like a sort of virtual Ceefax...
While their latest European sojourn may have been delayed if not yet derailed by coronavirus, Nuno Espirito Santo's Wolves side is by no means the first to get a taste of it. The early Fifties saw the men in old gold become the first club side in England to spend big on floodlights- a £10,000 set up approved at Molineux in 1953. And to show it off they arranged friendlies against the continent's best- one of which was witnessed by L'Equipe editor Gabriel Hanot, so impressed by their 3-2 win over Honved on December 13, 1954 that he felt compelled to call for the creation of a European Cup.