It’s the last Daily Bee of the season!
For once, I’m glad to be writing this and not a more detailed, formal article. I was dumb enough to sign up to write the match preview for tomorrow’s match, and I’m already dreading it. I’m going to have to write about Mainz, and how they had been one of the best teams in the league in the second half of the season before losing their last four games, and I’m going to have to talk about Jonathan Burkhardt and what a great season he’s had, and I’m going to have to do it all under the paper-thin guise of journalistic integrity, all while quietly shitting my pants as I type.
But any pretext of journalistic integrity in the Daily Bee died long ago (you can tell because I started a sentence with “but,” and by pointing it out I now can’t be blamed for it.) Here, I can explain how I really feel about tomorrow’s match, which is that I have absolutely no flipping clue what to expect. Are Dortmund going to come out firing and score four goals? Maybe. Are they going to rack up 20 shots and choke each one in front of goal? It’s plausible. Are Mainz going to inexplicably play the games of their lives and batter Dortmund 3-1 to give Bayern the title? I wouldn’t be shocked. Are Mainz going to do just that, but Bayern choke anyway in Cologne, thereby giving BVB the Meisterschale in the most slapstick manner possible? With how the last few months have gone, it wouldn’t be out of character.
That’s because we’re in uncharted waters for this young but talented BVB squad. This will be the highest leverage match of many of these players’ careers. Forget the DFB Pokal final, or a Champions League Quarterfinal, because none of them compare to playing a win-or-go-home match to win a league title. We honestly have no idea how they will react, especially if things start to go wrong— say, Mainz score an early goal or the first half ends 0-0. How they react will say a lot about their character and whether they deserve to win a title.
The Links
- I’d post some links to some football-related news, but frankly there’s nothing in the footballing world I care about other than tomorrow’s match, so here’s a video of a dog eating a burrito in one second:
The Daily Buzz
Where will you be watching the game from? I will be at the Shady Maple Smorgasbord in Lancaster, PA, where I will be engorging myself with Pancakes, either in celebration or in sadness.