The New Zealand Herald

Dancing by themselves: scorers celebrate alone

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Erling Haaland scored the Bundesliga’s first goal in more than two months and then celebrated. Alone.

The 19-year-old’s Borussia Dortmund teammates stayed away, mindful of the strict hygiene measures amid the coronaviru­s pandemic, as Germany’s football season resumed in unpreceden­ted conditions yesterday.

Dortmund beat Schalke 4-0 in the first Ruhr derby to be played in an empty stadium. Calls and shouts from coaching staff and players, and the thud of the sanitised ball being kicked, reverberat­ed around the mainly deserted stands.

Players had been warned to keep their emotions in check, and to desist from spitting, handshakes and hugging, with the games keenly watched by the rest of the football world hoping to restart their own leagues.

Team staff and players who didn’t start wore masks. Substitute­s took their positions in the stands, rather than beside the field, while balls and seats were disinfecte­d.

Haaland celebrated his 10th goal in nine Bundesliga games with a restrained dance as his teammates stayed back.

“It’s hard,” midfielder Julian Brandt said. “But that’s the way it is now. We try to stick to the rules.”

Brandt set up Raphael Guerreiro before the break and Thorgan Hazard after it. Hazard celebrated alone in front of the Westfalens­tadion’s south terrace, where normally the club’s ‘Yellow Wall’ of almost 25,000 fervent fans would be standing.

“It felt strange, also for the players. You could see that with the celebratio­ns,” Dortmund team coordinato­r Sebastian Kehl said.

Schalke became the first team to make five substituti­ons in a Bundesliga game in a new temporary measure allowed in the league, but they couldn’t change the outcome. Dortmund’s players celebrated in front of the empty south terrace afterwards.

“To applaud all our fans who were watching on TV,” Kehl said.

Pre-game television interviews were conducted with long poles holding microphone­s and participan­ts keeping their distance.

“It’s quite surreal,” Dortmund chief executive Hans Joachim Watzke said. “I’ve received messages from all over

I’ve received messages from all over the world that everybody is watching and then you go through the city and there’s nothing going on.

Dortmund CEO Hans Joachim Watzke

the world in the last couple of hours that everybody is watching and then you go through the city and there’s nothing going on.”

Elsewhere, Wolfsburg won 2-1 at Augsburg, where the home side’s new coach Heiko Herrlich was forced to watch from the stands after breaking quarantine to buy toiletries. Herrlich will return only after twice testing negative for the virus.

Celebratio­ns were muted throughout the league, with only Hertha’s players oversteppi­ng calls for restraint. In Leipzig’s home game, even though the stadium contained less than 300 people, one of them — a camera operator behind the goal — still managed to be hit on the head by a wayward shot.

They were the first games to be played in the league since March 11.

 ?? Photo / Getty Images ?? Erling Haaland scored the Bundesliga’s first post-Covid goal.
Photo / Getty Images Erling Haaland scored the Bundesliga’s first post-Covid goal.

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