If you cast your minds back to pre-season, we were beaten 4-1 away to MSV Duisburg, who had just been relegated to the Regionalliga (fourth tier) for the first time. Today, the Zebras secured the title and an instant return to the third division in front of crowds averaging more than 16,000.

Ignoring the frankly boring Bundesliga, the German Cup (DFB Pokal) offers some entertainment. This season saw the first ever third division team make the cup final in the form of Arminia Bielefeld. They will play VfB Stuttgart, who themselves have only won the cup three times, the last time in 1997. Ticket allocations are a talking point at the minute, with each club receiving just 24,000 tickets for the 80,000-capacity Olympic Stadium in Berlin.

Elsewhere, a club close to my heart has decided to "liven up" its season by replacing its sporting director and coaching team while perched precariously above the third division relegation zone. Worse still, the new head coach has no experience in professional football either as a player or as a manager and had two days to prepare his new team for the visit of 1860 Munich, who inevitably won 3-0 after Waldhof Mannheim (for it is they) put out a team that could only have been drawn out of a hat. I'm getting genuine Jamie Fullarton flashbacks here.

Nearly forgot to mention Bundesliga 2, which is gripped by the customary tight promotion race, with half the teams in the division having a chance of promotion with just four games remaining. The top two are Hamburg and Cologne, who would surely enrich the top flight, but there's a battle royale behind them. Hertha Berlin and Schalke look like they're going nowhere though.

Nice to see that Bayer Leverkusen have had a good a good season once again. They should finish as runners up & qualify for the Champions League once again. And they've only lost two games.

I thought that they would lose a lot of their best players to much bigger European clubs after last years exploits.

MSV Duisburg I have been told, had some good players when we played them in a friendly. It's nice to see they have gone on to gain promotion and restored their previous standing. I hope Notts follows via promotion through the playoffs. Then perhaps in a few year time, we can invite them to Meadow Lane to play us?

 

 

A sad story

 

It's more "tiresome and predictable" than sad @Piethagoram. KFC Uerdingen (unfortunately not nicknamed the chickens) seem to go through this cycle where they go on a wild spending spree with money they don't have, go bankrupt, and once they've dumped their debt they start again. This is something like their fifth insolvency. They shouldn't have been allowed in the Regionalliga. This just means they'll be playing a division lower next season, where they were last season anyway.

They were also in the third division a few years back, with a Russian investor promising to get them back to the Bundesliga. I don't need to tell you how it ended.

Back in the 80s this club was incidentally Bayer Uerdingen, until Bayer withdrew and decided to focus on Leverkusen instead.