VfB Stuttgart
VfB Stuttgart - Fortuna Duesseldorf 0:0
A little rain from a big cloud.
For the Schwaben, the match posed an opportunity to mitigate, at least partly, the pain of the 1:6 away defeat vs. Bayern the former weekend. For the visitors the match did not have any special flavour - just another fixture of the season. The match speakers reminded before the kick off, the last encounter between the two teams in the 1. Bundesliga (season 1985/86 in Duesseldorf) had ended up with a fabulous VfB victory (7:0) with as many as five goals scored by Juergen Klinsmann. This did not make any huge impression upon the audience though: if Klinsmann was the scorer, this must have been ages ago - many a man know the saying about the last year's snow...
Ibisevic's absence (consequence of the red card in the said match vs. Bayern) was very painful for VfB, unskilled efforts of the Bosnian's colleagues could not turn into anything positive. In this context, the 1. Bundesliga newcomers performed reasonably well, supported by a pretty big group of own fans occupying the corner sector of the stadium. A very decent skill level of Andrei Voronin - the European stadiums' veteran (his cv include Liverpool, Hertha Berlin and Dinamo Moscow) - despite his age (33) he entchanted his fans with a lot of invention and creativity. A standing ovation was seeing him when leaving the pitch, subsituted in the last phase of the match. He would have become an undisputable hero if he had turned a good pass into a goal yet his sooting attempt barely missed the target.
For a relatively long time the home fans had tolerated a somewhat lousy performance of their players yet fans' patience has its own limits either and voices of dissatisfaction had become increasingly louder - some players (e.g. Hajnal) had even benn called by their names.
Match logistics was really impressive. Around fifty five thousand opeople left the venue seamlessly with S-Bahn trains leaving for the city center provided regularly - no havoc, no stress, no fight to get into the coach. Which makes it no wonder why so many home fans are accompanied by kids. No risk, a lot of fun while supporting their beloved team.
