At the game there were the inevitable banners on display on the Ostkurve but also some more personal ones in the case shown below one referring to, as I understand it, the decision that Afghanistan is apparently safe to send people back to - "Afghanistan: Revision of the deadly misjudgement - #Stayistan".  I’m reluctant to comment too much on political statements that I may not fully understand but I'm not sure I’d fancy being sent back there much to be honest.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.  ​Pal is one of the best things that has happened to the club for many a long year in my humble opinion.
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Hearing in the news about the sacking of managers like Roger Schmidt and even more so that of Claudio Ranieri really makes you wonder if there is such a thing as loyalty in football.  Ranieri took Leicester, a struggling team, and against all of the odds kept them going to win the English Premier League. For his trouble, less than a year later, he was shown the door.  How does that make any sense?  As for the players who, as soon as Claudio left, started playing again and notching up points, could they not bust a gut to win for the man who led them to the title last season?  It appears they were otherwise occupied.  As for what was going on in the background?  Who knows?   Claudio is too decent a bloke to say but somebody was trying to push him out.  Where is the loyalty in that?
 
I guess the powers that be at Leicester decided that the club was in a downward spiral and dropping out of the Premiere league with the corresponding drop in income was too high a price to pay for loyalty.  Has big money really become so integrated into clubs that the prospect of demotion/lack of promotion/lack of European football outweighs any loyalty for successes achieved in the recent past?  

There has already been political opposition to the new stadium and I believe I am correct in saying the SPD in Berlin / Charlottenburg have spoken up against the plan for the new stadium with the only occasional use of the Olympiastadion for major games.  As a major contributor of funds to the city in the form of rent for the stadium the idea was never going to go down well with local politicians.

At the same time Hertha also announced a “Plan B” and this is where it gets really silly.  If they are not allowed to build within the Olympic Park the second option is to build the new stadium outside Berlin completely in Ludwigsfelde to the south of the city in Brandenburg.  For me this would mean a 45 minute journey rather than a 30 minute one but (and this is the crunch) the club is Hertha BERLIN and not Brandenburg.
 
Needless to say, wherever any new stadium is built, it will cost a significant amount of money.  Hertha would not get these funds from the city as it would make no sense for the city to pay leaving them with an arguably world class stadium and no major tenant.  As a result Hertha will have to come up with the money themselves somehow.  You can’t raise that kind of money by holding “bring and buy sales” or selling Bratwurst so that leaves us with “investors”.  The bottom line with “investors” is that they want to make money.  They will apply whatever pressure they feel is necessary to Hertha in order to make that money.  That may involve sacking managers, selling players, naming the new stadium the “Dildo King Stadium” and who knows what else.  They will be a bunch of suits that in all likelihood will have no interest in football, the club or its fans. 
 
Are the powers that be at Hertha taking us down the path of selling our soul to the devil? 
​If so, where is the loyalty in that?

Credit - Thanks to Opa for the stadium name suggestion :) - https://www.opas-reisetagebuch.de

On the Sunday after the match Hertha had a light training session at Schenckendorffplatz which gave an opportunity to see the players close up and say a thank you for the game the day before.  It also gave me a chance to get a couple of them to sign programs from the last two games. I asked Vedad Ibisevic to sign the Bayern edition of "Wir Herthaner" as he scored the goal against them. For the edition from the Dortmund game who else would I ask other than Marvin Plattenhardt?  The programs will form just a little memento of two cracking games albeit memorable for different reasons! I didn’t pester them beyond that as I’m sure they wanted to get off and enjoy their richly deserved Sunday afternoon off.

​Match day twenty one was a grey old day in Berlin.  Nothing new there but if anyone said they knew how that grey day was going to turn out they were lying through their teeth.  
Whenever a big team comes to town you will always find their “fans” coming out of the woodwork and this weekend was no exception. The train going to the stadium was crawling with red shirts and scarves which I find (perhaps slightly irrationally) really irritating.  I believe it is no coincidence that these part time “fans” support a team that normally wins and many of them will have never been to the Allianz Arena let alone live in Munich.  I go to most of the Hertha home games come rain, shine or ice although I missed the Schalke game as I was on holiday in Spain and I’ll miss one other (Eintracht Frankfurt).  On that basis alone I think I qualify as being a true Herthaner.  ​

If you compare the crowds for the game against Ingolstadt and that for Bayern the numbers don’t lie.  There were 33,425 supporters in the Olympiastadion for the Ingolstadt game and 77,647 when the league leaders came.  As you can see in the two photos below the hard core supporters were there for both games but the rest?  You can read there are reasons why fan numbers in Berlin can be problematical in one of my previous posts – Why So Many Empty Seats?  Unlike some I will never lose faith with the Olympiastadion as I believe it to be a magnificent venue but I find it frustrating how a bit of poor weather or perhaps the visiting team not being deemed to be top notch and people stay away and watch it in a bar somewhere.​

I am not a native Berliner and yet, for good or ill, Hertha is my club.  Perhaps not - “Aus Berlin” but certainly “Für Berlin”.  Sometimes I wonder about fate and if a club chooses you rather than you choosing it but perhaps that is delving into philosophy and this is not an appropriate space to be discussing that!
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On match day itself I emerged from my slumbers with my normal irrationally optimistic outlook on the coming game.  After all we have not fared too badly at the hands of Bayern in recent years and once the ninety minutes start anything can happen right?   On my more rational side I thought we had just squeaked past Ingolstadt and lost elsewhere away from home so holding our own would feel like quite an achievement!

At this game I needed to weave through not only the blue and white faithful but also depressing numbers of people wearing red.  It came to light later that were 20,000 Bayern supporters at the game.  Little did it matter that much of this league leader support may have been “part time”.

The support from the Hertha faithful was magnificent as usual and a rousing “Sha La la la la la la Hertha BSC” before the game – turn up your volume to watch the clip below!

Once the match got under way it was clear that Bayern were not going to have an afternoon off like they did against Arsenal earlier on in the week.  Hertha took the game to the Bavarians and defended solidly as well.  Some of the statistics that were put up during the match suggested that Bayern had 70% possession. Frankly, from where I was sitting, this appeared ridiculous to me.  Hertha counter attacked well and Salomon Kalou in particular made some magnificent runs down the pitch.  One of these was cut short by being felled by Mats Hummels near the half way line (yellow card).  Another finished with a cross to Genki Haraguchi who sadly blasted the shot into the stand.

In the twenty first minute Marvin Planttenhardt went down at the edge of the box and, although it wasn’t a foul, was awarded a free kick (hey, it’s happened to us often enough!).  The free kick went into the box and our captain poked it in giving Hertha a 1:0 lead.  I gather this was his first goal for 600 minutes of football but it was worth the wait,  I wasn’t alone in going absolutely bonkers! 

Hertha went on defending solidly and even when Lewandowski was brought on with thirty minutes to go Rune Jarstein and the back four were not letting anything through.  When it came to full time with Bayern still a goal down and the officials put up five minutes of extra time I couldn’t believe my eyes.  Where on earth had they got five minutes?  I have never been to a Bundesliga match with anywhere near that amount of extra time even with substitutions.  When that five minutes was up Hertha were still 1:0 up but there was still no whistle – not until near the end of the 96th when Lewandowski put in a rebound.  For a few minutes the supporters in the ground were in limbo as it wasn’t clear what was going on.  The score didn’t go up on the displays straight away and a couple of Bayern Fans turned around and asked “is it 1:1 or what?”  To say I felt cheated would be an understatement of epic proportions even though I would have been thrilled about a draw before the match.
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The football gods are fickle indeed. 

The following game ended with a 2:0 home win and three more points with goals from Marvin Plattenhardt and Salomon Kalou.  The free kick from Plattenhardt was an absolute cracker going straight into the top right corner of the Darmstadt goal.  Kalou broke free from his defender to get a free header for the second.

The result left the Old Lady in third place over the winter break 2016/17 and the players walked from the dugout towards the Ostkurve to thank the fans as well as wish them a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

 As I mentioned earlier in this post, the ultras held a protest with banners and a message to the powers that be in the club.  Their concerns related to the ongoing saga of a new, purpose built stadium that has been in the news again recently.  A feasibility study has thrown up suggestions of potential new sites for a stadium beyond the city limits in Brandenburg. 

Getting home after the match and with the current run of home wins the odd glass or two just forced their way down my throat!  Poor Herthinho however . . . 
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I am so glad that I made it to this match to see it “in the flesh”.  If I had stayed at home nursing injury I would have been gutted to have missed such a triumphant display and the chance to applaud Salomon Kalou upon his return to form after such a difficult time for him.