Reuters Soccer Blog
World Soccer views and news
If you’re only going to learn one word in German, make it ‘Tor!’
Luca Toni has evidently not learned much German in the eight months since he moved over the Alps a few hundred kilometres north of native Italy to the Bavarian capital of Munich.
With plenty of translators at his service and a wide range of fine Italian restaurants in Munich to pick from, there’s little need to spend time studying the difficult tongue-twisting language of Goethe and Schiller. His interviews in the German media are invariably translated from Italian.
But Bayern Munich coach Ottmar Hitzfeld revealed on Sunday that Toni has in the meantime enriched his vocabulary with at least one German term – Tor (goal).
“I asked him at half-time if he wanted to play the whole match or come off and he just said ‘Tor, Tor, Tor’,” Hitzfeld said after Toni had scored twice in the first half against Dortmund, by which time they were leading 4-0.
Getafe get gutsy in gruelling game
Despite seeing literally hundreds of games over the course of a season, there is the occasional match you know will stick with you forever and Thursday’s UEFA Cup quarter-final between Getafe and Bayern Munich was one of them.
It was the second Spanish-German clash I’d been to this week, having gone to the Nou Camp for the Barcelona-Schalke Champions League match the night before, but in terms of pure emotion and excitement there was absolutely no comparison. No excuses for resorting to an overused cliché because this time it is no exaggeration – this one was a real rollercoaster of a Cup tie.
