With New Year's come and gone, all Bundesliga teams have ended their brief winter vacation and
have traveled to training camps in much warmer climates than Germany. Many teams have already
played warm-up test matches and have begun running out their newest winter signings. The second
half of the season begins with match day 18 on January 20.
When I first started watching football as a child in the mid-1980's FC Cologne (1. FC Köln) was
one of the traditional powerful clubs of the Bundesliga. Cologne was the first champion of the
Bundesliga in 1963/64 and in 1978 won the "double," which to this day is the pinnacle of success in
the Rhein city.
Well it's happened again. Not even a full season back in top flight football and the "old dame"
Hertha has been embroiled in a soap opera of daytime TV proportions, where nobody ends up looking
good. Manager Markus Babbel and Sport Director Michael Preetz were entangled in a war of words
where one was trying to paint the other as a liar and claiming who did or did not say what,
when.
When I was in Germany back in December, I watched an interview with Bayern Munich's Sporting
Director Christian Nerlinger. Part of the discussion revolved around Bayern's interest in the
newest young German football star, Marco Reus, who Bayern executive Karl-Heinz Rummenigge termed "a
person of interest.
