It doesn’t happen very often at the end of a competitive football match, but Monday’s DFB Cup first round tie between the amateurs of TSV Germania Windeck and the stars of Bayern ended with both teams pleased and delighted. The part-timers celebrated in front of the North stand, where it seemed nearly all able-bodied members of the rural community of 20,000 had gathered. And the men from Munich acknowledged their sizeable support among the extraordinary 41,100 crowd at the RheinEnergie Stadium in Cologne, thanking the fans for their noisy encouragement in the first competitive match of the new campaign.
The entertaining 90-minute cup clash thus ended with two winners. The first was Louis van Gaal’s team, through to the second round after an ultimately routine and fully predictable 4-0 victory over the fifth-division side. The second winners were Windeck and TSV Germania, whose chairman Franz-Josef Wernze was seen dancing on the touchline when the attendance was announced. The crowd was a new record for an amateur team at home in the DFB Cup.
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