The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Ephemeral (from Greek εφήμερος – ephemeros, literally “lasting only one day”) This lasted < 2 minutes, being a core component of my celebration of New Zealand’s All Blacks beating Australia’s…
Halftime score: 0:0 Niko Bungert has a market value of €2.5m. He marked Robert Lewandowski (who scored 5 goals in 9 minutes against Wolfsburg last week) Market value? €50m He…
The Coface Arena in Mainz holds 34,000 spectators. It’s normally pretty full, but when Bayern Munich turns up, you’re like sardines in a tin. I figured that trying to score…
Being forced to sit in the Porter House, an Irish pub in Mainz, drinking Guinness and watching the Rugby World Cup game NZL vs ARG on a big flat screen…
No sooner have you fallen in love with a player and got Gran to buy you his strip for Christmas than another club snaps him up and he’s gone. As…
In New Zealand, there’s no greater achievement. Once you’ve played for the national Rugby team, it’s not “Oh, he used to be an All Black”, it’s “He’s an All Black”…
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is an excellent national Sunday newspaper. It’s just that they don’t know sh*t from clay when it comes to forecasting the Bundesliga. Just look at last…
Wednesday in Mainz 05’s ancient Bruchweg stadium to see a pre-season test game against Lazio Roma. 2 of Christoph’s 7 grand-kids (Grace and Freya, 7 and 5) had turned up…
Lazio Roma is invariably a serious contender for championship honours in the Italian Serie A football league. Mainz 05’s ambition – declared annually – is just to stay in the…
The inventiveness of Mainz 05’s hard-core fans knows no bounds. Any vertical space is fair game, but thgs is creative – 19 on the left butress, 05 on the right…
Nikolce Noveski is a professional footballer, capped 58 times for Macedonia, played 347 games for Mainz05 over a period of 11 years. He’s a hard-as-nails /bites-yer-legs defender and by all…
I don’t get to go to many games of our local 1st Division football team, Mainz05. I should try harder. Someone wrote a Letter to the Editor last week, echoing…
Mainz 05. Home game. Park the car in Bretzenheim Walk through the fields.
Parked outside Heinrich’s Die Wirtschaft up around the Kästrich. If you’ve done the Coast to Coast even once, you can be rightfully proud of yourself. It’s 243km from the West…
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, a highly regarded weekly sister publication to the quality national daily FAZ, isn’t too positive about Mainz 05’s chances in the Bundesliga/First Diviso=ion this year. OK,…
You’re up and down like a jack-in-the-box at a Mainz 05 game. The hard core fans start off a chant and then everyone’s on their feet joining in (with varying…
First game of the season (qualification game for the European League)and with a new trainer. Not the best game I’ve seen, but definitely not the worst, (although Stefan Bell’s about…
…will stop you right in your tracks… KM 2.83. Got out my chainsaw, lopped off a few branches, off we went…
The neighbours have the right idea. Hope it helps, but that was a pretty dodgy performance against Algeria the other night and those Froggies…er.. the French national team is looking…
“Public viewing” is one of those Denglisch words that baffle native English speakers. (We think it means the laying out a corpse for mourners to traipse past…) Along with (the…
So. England’s gone Spain’s gone. Italy’s on the brink. Barbara and Giovanni at Potobello in Ober-Olm are understandably a bit nervous – lose to Uruguay tomorrow and they’re gone, too.…
Climbing walls in Mombach. Or are they tetrahexadons? Whatever.
Rugby. Ireland vs New Zealand. 1 New Zealander. 6 Irish. 1 German, rooting for NZ. NZ wins 24:22 in overtime. Bloody hell….
One of my sporting epiphanic experiences was watching a game of our local team, Mainz 05. Mainz had recently reappeared in the First Division and had a horde of middling-to-good…
Podlowski, Podolski , Müller and Unnamed – German national football team merchandising victims at the team’s training session at Mainz 05’s stadium last week.
Mainz has around 200,000 inhabitants. 20,000 of them turned up at the Coface Arena to watch the German national football team training for their friendly match against Paraguay on Wednesday…
MediaMarkt, a big-box consumer/electronics store, frequently has stunningly effective marketing campaigns, mostly aimed at grabbing market share. The current one: Buy something – anything – and front up at the…
If there’s one football (soccer to you…) team that polarises in Germany, it’s Bayern Munich. Hugely successful (which in itself generates a huge following – who wants to go through…
Seriously, what can beat this? A summer’s day out on the bike and not imagining in my WILDEST DREAMS that Mainz 05, our local team, would end the year at…
Mainz Daily Photo 