The Warm-Up: The end of home advantage?
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Updated 25/05/2020 at 09:27 GMT
The sample size is v small, but the admittedly limited evidence from Germany is that having no fans to cheer you on isn't great for your prospects of winning games...
Timo Werner of RB Leipzig reacts as he celebrates scoring his sides fourth goal with team mate Kevin Kampl during the Bundesliga match between 1. FSV Mainz 05 and RB Leipzig at Opel Arena on May 24, 2020 in Mainz, Germany.
Image credit: Getty Images
MONDAY’S BIG STORIES
Are behind-closed-doors games eliminating home advantage?
There are two groups of people who aren’t quite as enamoured about the return of the Bundesliga as everyone else. One is a certain group of ultras, probably quite justifiably annoyed that football has been rushed back before anyone is really certain that the threat of covid-19 has disappeared, reasoning that football without fans is not football, and that if clubs can’t survive for more than a few months without any games then, well, that’s their problem.
The other, we suspect, might be anyone who has anything to do with Mainz, particularly when they looked at who they would have to play. A decent 2-2 draw with Cologne in their first game back perhaps suggested that the team on the edge of the relegation spots might actually have some life in them, but that was rapidly beaten out of them this weekend by RB Leipzig generally, and Timo Werner specifically.
Leipzig had already given Mainz a thorough horsing back in the days when football was normal, beating them 8-0 back in November, so perhaps they were lucky to get away with just the five this time. That’s actually not just a glib line: Leipzig were 3-0 ahead after just over half an hour, missed a load of extremely presentable chances and had a goal disallowed in one of those ‘yeah, technically that’s offside but it probably wouldn’t have made a difference’ circumstances. Werner, half-striker, half walking transfer speculation, helped himself to his 28th, 29th and 30th goals of the season: in these days of still limited football, it’s unlikely to dampen down any talk of a move to Liverpool or wherever.
Elsewhere, the main theme to emerge from this second round of Bundesliga games, carrying over from the first, is that you don’t really want to be a home team in this fan-less era of football. Only two sides won at their own place this weekend – Hertha in the Berlin derby, and Bayern over Eintracht Frankfurt – adding to the one that prevailed on the first weekend back, which was Borussia Dortmund.
This is, admittedly, a small sample size, but only four out of 19 possible home wins (including the one between Borussia Monchengladbach and Koln before the suspension of the league) seems a touch low. And indeed it is: 222 games have been played in front of fans in the Bundesliga this season, and 98 were won by the home team, which works out at around 44%. Perhaps this is just a quirk of these fixtures, and we will need plenty more rounds of games to really determine whether this is a thing, but it does look rather like the absence of your very own baying mob is making a fairly big difference to how you play on your own patch.
Testing, testing, COVID-19
There’s good news and bad news about the state of COVID-19 in English football, ahead of a proposed return of the game in June at some point. The good news is that, after teams in the Football League tested 1,014 players and members of staff, only two came back positive, and those both from Hull City. As the Championship gears up to returning in a few weeks, this can only be regarded as a good thing.
The bad news comes as more positive tests are reported in the Premier League, one from Bournemouth, another from a mystery club. This is in addition to the six people from three clubs that were announced last week, and while eight people from the many hundreds that work in and around the 20 Premier League clubs doesn’t sound particularly bad, it’s the knock-on effect of it all that is slightly concerning.
We have already seen Troy Deeney and N’Golo Kante quite reasonably express their reluctance to go back while all of this is so uncertain, and with every positive test the likelihood of more players following their lead increases. We don’t necessarily want to play Debbie Downer here, but this was always the concern, that it was all very well making plans to play behind closed doors and limit the number of people at the grounds and wipe everything down very thoroughly, but it all relied on the players actually being willing to play.
You wonder how many more positive tests it will take for more players to refuse, and then where might it leave us.
Were France ‘stupid’ to cancel their season?
All of that said, some people are still pretty unhappy that football has been curtailed for the season. One of which is Lyon president Jean-Michel Aulas, who expressed his dissatisfaction about the pretty early decision to call off Ligue 1 in April.
Auals told L’Equipe:
In the past two months, the Spanish officials have been observing and working with UEFA. What is paradoxical is that Javier Tebas [La Liga president], in particular, attended the same meetings than [French League director-general] Didier Quillot, notably that of April 23. In fact, what was said at that meeting with UEFA is ‘patience’. When we see that our officials attended this meeting and drew different conclusions, one can feel that we are really too stupid
Of course, it should be noted that the curtailment of the season meant Lyon missed out on a European place having recovered their form from some early season woes, so Aulas is not quite an objective party in all of this, although when this was put to him he pinky swore that he would have reacted in the same way. And we it should also be clear that the French league took their guidance from the French government.
But is Aulas right? Did France call things off too early? And the Netherlands? And Belgium? And Scotland? Will they be the ones who look silly after all of this, or will that be the rest of us?
HEROES AND ZEROS
Hero: Kai Havertz
He is, and we cannot stress this enough, dreamy.
Zeroes: A few Sevilla dunces
Look, we don’t want to be too harsh on Ever Banega, Lucas Ocampos, Franco Vazquez and Luuk de Jong. Perhaps they were just following their instincts, after all. But what strikes us almost more than the fact that these players broke lockdown to have what appears to be a banging pool party is that they probably would have got away with it had they not a) posed for a picture and b) that picture had been posted on Instagram.
“I want to apologise for what happened yesterday,” Banega said. “It was a family get together with teammates but unknowingly, we were wrong. I want to apologise to our club, fans and society in general. It won’t happen again.”
Sure it won’t. But please, Ever, we ask only this: we know you’ve been caught out on camera before, but if you’re going to be naughty, at least don’t be stupid with it.
HAT TIP
Patrick Kluivert has, with the precision that accompanies an Ajax upbringing, just offered a photo-realistic description of the goal that changed European football. Twenty-five years have passed but no detail is spared: the gap into which he invited Frank Rijkaard’s pass; the ricochet that set him teetering as Zvonimir Boban slid in; the instinctive adjustment and extension of a toe that sent the ball rolling beyond Sebastiano Rossi. He knows it by heart but the feelings that came out eight minutes later can be explained more simply. “It was crazy, what happened after the final whistle,” he says. “Everybody was just out of their brains.”
Nick Ames looks back on the 1995 Champions League final for the Guardian, with the help of Patrick Kluivert, Ronald de Boer and Daniele Massaro.
RETRO CORNER
It’s the 15th anniversary of Kaka’s pass to Hernan Crespo. Plus there was some other stuff that went on that night too. Enjoy.
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