Lucky Lucky

The question mark with Brazilians (and South Americans in general) comes in the winter. Can someone used to mild winters and hot summers handle the chill of a German winter? And what about snow? How will he react to snow?

If you’re Cicero, it’s by scoring one goal and setting up another in a 3-2 away win over Bochum.

The Brazilian has been in pretty excellent form lately, and he didn’t let a little chill slow him down. It may have been the first time he’s seen snow but he didn’t let it stop him. The first goal came on the 25th minute, with Raffael scoring from Cicero’s deflected cross. After a Gojko Kacar goal from Andriy Voronin’s corner, it was time for Cicero to get a goal himself. The other impressive performer of the season, Maximilian Nicu, provided the cross that he headed in. (Then, he apparently called home to Brazil And went tubing with das Bild in tow.)

Thanks to his help, Hertha raced into a 3-0 lead before the half. It was the best half away they’d played since 1973. Against Fortuna Köln. Which is kind of…well, that shows where we’ve come.

The second half, though, was a different story. Hertha got complacent and let Bochum back into the game. The Ruhr club came out on fire and scored their first goal after only five minutes of the half. Then another after the 73rd. Bochum came at us with everything they had, but somehow, we still held on. More luck, I suppose. We’ve had a lot.

I said before this game that the Bochum result would say a lot about where we really are. How would we react to being a team that people were talking about? Not poorly, although not entirely brilliant. An excellent first half followed by complacency, but ending up with the three points at the end. Another combination of luck and skill. We rode our chances in the second half, but were only able to because we did well in the first. I’d like to say that against a team better than Bochum we’d have been made to pay, but…have we, yet? Hamburg, Leverkusen, and Hoffenheim are better, and we weren’t.

What can be taken from it, though, is that we’re still here. We’re back to fourth. We continue rolling on, continue to confound the critics. Despite what should be on paper, we’re a winning team. And I couldn’t be happier.

Category: Team News

Tags: Team News

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