Never Neverkusenland
- Details
- Created: Wednesday, 03 June 2020 21:36
- 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...
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!
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