A blizzard of Bundesliga

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This article was published 22/05/2020 (2277 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Blink, and you’ll miss it. Just a week after restarting its season — and becoming the first major professional sports league to do so — the Bundesliga will kick off a five-day fixture festival that could well end up being the most formative phase of its pandemic-adjusted schedule.

If last weekend’s German football resumption already seems long-since passed, or if it’s like it only just happened, it’s because hours, days and weeks have lost their precision in the time of COVID-19.

Not that long ago, as the seasons changed and hope was absent from the spring, there was little sense that anything normal would return anytime soon. Now there are to be 17 matches played by Wednesday, and 18, counting Friday’s Berlin Derby.

While rival divisions on several continents remain in limbo, the Bundesliga is rocketing towards its season’s conclusion at warp speed.

It’s a startling contrast. La Liga, for example, is still three weeks away from returning; Serie A will only follow one, two or three weeks after that. The Premier League is embarrassing itself through incompetence that mirrors the British government’s. Major League Soccer, like its North American counterparts, are mulling the gimmick of a single-location tournament.

Leaving them all behind, the Bundesliga, like some unlikely phenomenon far off in the future, is generating match-day storylines.

Foremost among them is the title race, which appears to be a two-team affair.

First-place Bayern Munich, having consolidated their position by beating Union Berlin on Sunday, will host Eintracht Frankfurt today (11:30 a.m., Sportsnet) in a rematch of their November encounter in which Eintracht prevailed 5-1. Having lost just two of their 22 matches since that shellacking, Bayern have shot to the table’s summit and currently sit four points above second-place Borussia Dortmund, who thumped Schalke 4-0 last Saturday.

Dortmund will visit Wolfsburg today (8:30 a.m., Sportsnet) and will likely need all three points to keep pace with Bayern. Their hosts, however, won 2-1 away at Augsburg last weekend and are trying to beat Freiburg and Schalke to the final Europa League berth. It won’t be an easy trip.

Then, on Tuesday (11:30 a.m., Sportsnet), the top two sides will go head-to-head in Der Klassiker — a national derby match won 4-0 by Bayern in November’s reverse fixture. The best Dortmund can do is narrow the gap to a single point by next weekend, when it all gets going again.

By June 17, Bundesliga teams will have played six matches in 32 days. Their next three will come in a space of a week and a half. Pre-shutdown form means nothing now. Although certain segments of the standings are already set, the sides that succeed between now and next month will be the ones whose players kept fit during quarantine and managed to avoid sustaining injuries last Saturday and Sunday.

To that end, there were at least 14 players who went down with one knock or another over the course of their first match in more than two months. Dortmund’s Thorgan Hazard was withdrawn after he, himself, replaced Claudio Reyna ahead of the Revierderby, and Schalke lost Jean-Clair Todibo and Armine Harit during the same encounter.

Hoffenheim, losing 3-0 at home to Hertha Berlin, appeared to be one of the teams least-prepared for the restart. Sebastian Rudy and Ihlas Bebou were injured in the match, and now, with Europa League aspirations fading, the ninth-place will visit a healthy Paderborn outfit in one of today’s early kickoffs. Paderborn are bottom of the division but picked up a point in a draw with Fortuna Dusseldorf the last time out and could leapfrog Werder Bremen with another positive result. Bremen were beaten 4-1 by Bayer Leverkusen on Monday and will today face Freiburg — another team that impressed after the break in a 1-1 draw at fourth-place RB Leipzig.

Top of the Bundesliga as recently as January, Leipzig are still unbeaten in seven matches but look like another team that could struggle for fitness in the short term. They’ll visit Mainz on Sunday and will be tested by an opponent that drew 2-2 at Koln.

Bayer Leverkusen thoroughly impressed in their 4-1 triumph at Bremen, manager Peter Bosz experimenting with the multitalented Kai Havertz in the centre of the attack. Havertz, 20, is one of the top young players in world football — and one of the sport’s best midfielders, period — and his success in yet another position will make his side a tricky proposition between now and the end of the season.

A single point back of Leipzig and the Champions League places, Leverkusen will move into the top four with a win today at third-place Borussia Monchengladbach (8:30 a.m., Sportsnet World).

Having played some desperate catch-up since dropping to 10th in November, the season’s suspension might have done them more good than any other Bundesliga team. Now refreshed, they should be confident as they undertake what might be the top flight’s most difficult run of matches. Following ’Gladbach, they’ll take on Wolfsburg, Freiburg, Bayern and Schalke in a 17-day stretch.

At any other time, this sort of fixture congestion would inevitably cause a handful of teams and the storylines surrounding them to be lost in a multi-league, multi-competition news cycle. Even now, it’s still a lot to process.

But there is no other league at present, no other competitions or other sports to follow game-by-game. It’s Germany’s reward for competence in leadership and trust in public health.

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The next month and a bit of the Bundesliga schedule will possess the daily routine and familiarity of a baseball season.

Blink and you’ll miss it. Turn away and something will happen. Actual games are being played — a lot of them, important ones — and by the end of June one of the most ambitious undertakings in the history of sports will reach its conclusion.

It begins in earnest now.

jerradpeters@gmail.com

Twitter @JerradPeters