From Revierderby to Kai Havertz: a guide to the Bundesliga

Eerie silence resounds as Germany ushers in football’s new abnormal
Barney Ronay

www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2020/may/16/germany-borussia-dortmund-schalke

In Leipzig the players bumped elbows and grinned like this was all a little bit silly. In Dortmund Erling Haaland scored the first goal of football’s plague times and stood by the corner flag with his teammates around him in a celebratory pastiche of social distancing, a strangely haunting image that will, you suspect, be recycled many times.

Welcome to the new abnormal normal. Which is, needless to say, a fairly strange place to be. And yet for all the oddity of its staging, something did seem to shift over the 90 minutes of Borussia Dortmund’s 4-0 defeat of Schalke at Signal Iduna Park, one of six comeback fixtures to take place in the Bundesliga, two months since football – and that rather less urgent entity, the world – went into standby mode.

There was encouragement here for the industry. By the end it wasn’t too hard to see how televised football might re-emerge as a functioning entity. No spitting. No hugging. No fans. No noise beyond the constant muffled echo of managerial shrieking, like the sound of somebody being water-boarded in the flat upstairs.