Borussia Dortmund’s win over Schalke was a welcome return for a sport that has been reborn as a deeply strange spectacle
In Leipzig the players bumped elbows and grinned like this was all a little bit silly. In Dortmund Erling Haaland scored the first goal of football’s plague times and stood by the corner flag with his teammates around him in a celebratory pastiche of social distancing, a strangely haunting image that will, you suspect, be recycled many times.
Welcome to the new abnormal normal. Which is, needless to say, a fairly strange place to be. And yet for all the oddity of its staging, something did seem to shift over the 90 minutes of Borussia Dortmund’s 4-0 defeat of Schalke at Signal Iduna Park, one of six comeback fixtures to take place in the Bundesliga, two months since football – and that rather less urgent entity, the world – went into standby mode.
Written by Barney Ronay
This news first appeared on https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2020/may/16/germany-borussia-dortmund-schalke under the title “Eerie silence resounds as Germany ushers in football’s new abnormal | Barney Ronay”. Bolchha Nepal is not responsible or affiliated towards the opinion expressed in this news article.
