I bring this up because our next opponents are none other than Borussia Mönchengladbach. They’re one of the storied teams of German football, dominating the seventies (I believe, based on the shorts on the uniforms, the video was filmed sometime in the early eighties) before struggling a bit throughout the nineties and whatever this decade is called. They got relegated again in 2007, but bounced right back in 2008, and it seems that time spent in the 2. Liga may have done them well- they’ve redone the team in their time away and have their finances in order. Jan kindly provided us with a guide, which is far more detailed than anything I could put together. If you want to know more about them, check that out.

Their current record is a bit iffy, certainly more so than ours. A 3-2 win over Werder Bremen doesn’t do enough to cover the losses to Stuttgart and Hoffenheim, and last round’s game was a 5-1 tonking away to Hannover (who today lost 4-0 to Bayer Leverkusen). Life back in the Bundesliga is proving to be a bit difficult, but they can definitely play and have some very talented young players to do so. The expectation is that they’ll be spending next year in the first league, and they’ll be looking to consolidate that when we visit.

Marko Marin is probably the player to watch out for- check out his goal against Belgium, if you haven’t already- a fabulous little elf of a player. For American fans, they’ve got Michael Bradley, the young midfielder (and son of national team manager Bob) who scored some ridiculous amount of goals for Heerenveen in the past two seasons. There was much expectation that Bradley would be off to a higher-profile club after leaving Heerenveen, but he saw something in ‘Gladbach. And they’ve even got a Canadian, Rob Friend, who was kind enough to let the Hertha website interview him. (He also scores goals. We should watch out for him.)

As far as Hertha goes, we’re likely to be without Patrick Ebert, who has a groin injury. We will, however, be seeing Raffael in all likeliness, after he missed St. Patrick’s to be around for the birth of his son. Other than that, the team is expected to be unchanged since the visit of the Irish.

My hope for the game? Better finishing and better concentration. A combination of the lack of those things (finishing & concentration) has cost us points and could have ended up damaging our UEFA Cup hopes. I want to see some improvement when we go visit that nice new Borussia-Park.

Speaking of nice new stadiums, the Berlin government made some positive noise about the thought of us having one. Particularly in the suggestion of us making use of either of the two airports that will be closing in the near future- Templehof, which closes this year, and Tegel, which closes in 2012 (Berlin-Brandenburg is building a new airport, scheduled to open in 2012, finally giving the city an airport that can fit all the people wanting to go there). The benefits of the airports as sites is that they’re already well connected to highway and transit, as well as already having neighbors who are used to the noise. It’s a distinct possibility.