Klopp by Raphael Honigstein

Author:Raphael Honigstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-11-16T05:00:00+00:00

11. ONE, TWO AND ALMOST THREE

Dortmund 2010–2013

Nuri Şahin, Mats Hummels, Marcel Schmelzer, Neven Subotić and Sven Bender looked at each other and started giggling in disbelief, like schoolboys who had just pulled off the most elaborate prank on their teacher. The moment lasted only ‘two seconds’, says Hummels, ‘but it felt like two hours’. The 80,000 punch-drunk, screaming supporters on the terraces were shaking the Signal Iduna Park so hard that time itself became unstuck.

Stadium announcer Norbert Dickel had set off the earthquake, crying out that Köln were 2-0 up at Leverkusen, Dortmund’s last remaining rival for the top spot. BVB were leading 2-0 against 1. FC Nürnberg, only twenty minutes away from winning the Bundesliga title, with two games to spare. ‘We knew then that he had done it but couldn’t quite comprehend it,’ says Hummels of that unforgettable day in April 2011. Subotić: ‘We were babies, most of us weren’t even twenty-three yet. We had no idea what was happening to us. We knew we were there. But we didn’t quite know how we got there and what being there actually meant.’ Bender: ‘I had goosebumps like never before in my life. It was a brutally emotional moment, a realisation: we, a bunch of kids, had done it. Looking back I’m almost sad I couldn’t enjoy it more. But it was just too unreal and over too quickly to take in in its entirety.’ Klopp was equally unable to fully appreciate the occasion. ‘I thought it would feel better, more euphoric,’ he said, almost apologetically. ‘Perhaps the pressure on us was a little stronger than we were prepared to admit.’

For everyone else, the minutes, hours and days afterwards were a blur. Kevin Großkreutz, running around with a partially shaved head like a madman (the batteries of the electric razor had run out). Keeper Roman Weidenfeller, telling an Al-Jazeera reporter in a hilarious mix of German and English ‘we have a grandios saison gespielt’. ‘Fans hugging, crying. Five hundred thousand people in the streets of Dortmund. Beer. Champagne’ (Subotić). ‘Two weeks of emergency rule’ (BVB president Reinhard Rauball). ‘It was total ecstasy, impossible to put into words,’ Hummels says. ‘You had a town mad about football, a club mad about football, and a coach in Kloppo who always put the supporters at the heart of things in a very extreme manner. The combination of all of that created an energy that people still talk about today and will never stop talking about.’

Sebastian Kehl, one of a handful of players over thirty, had experienced winning the title with Dortmund before, in 2002, as had Weidenfeller. Borussia’s financial near-death experience in the intervening years made the 2010–11 league win more special still, he explains. ‘To see the joy in people’s eyes after they had been worried for so long about the future of their club and had wished for the glory days to return … we felt so incredibly happy for them. We were able to give something in return to them after all those difficult years.

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