Remember throwing paper balls in school?

A paper ball has rolled through every editorial department we have in Germany, being in the center of general attention, while the night before, it was responsible for Hamburg’s UEFA-Cup semi-final exit.

What happened? The HSV supporters had a beautiful choreography using paper tapes in their team colors blue, white and black. A few fans threw their scrunched up paper stripes on the pitch afterwards, where one particular paper ball lay peacefully until the 84^th minute. Then Hamburg defender Michael Gravgaard came. Bremen led 2-1 up until now, he wanted to pass an easy ball back to his goalkeeper, he struck out, but the ball rolled over that innocent paper ball and jumped against his leg where it bounced off over the line. Although the paper ball was offside the referee decided to give Bremen a corner kick. Diego’s kick first landed on Bremen’s Almeida’s head, then on Hamburg’s Trochowski’s before Bremen’s Frank Baumann pushed the ball with his forehead in the net, scoring the decisive 3-1.

Bremen have now won twice in Hamburg, kicking their northern rivals out of two semi-finals and lead the 4-games-in-19-days-series 2-1. The next clash will be in Bremen on Sunday, where Hamburg can make up for their decisive defeats and maintain their chance to reach one of the top spots in the Bundesliga tables at the end of the season. Bremen already gave up their Bundesliga season a couple of weeks ago which was the right tactic to focus on the decisive and important semi-final games against Hamburg. The UEFA-Cup trophy as well as the DFB-Pokal is calling for their name to be engraved on it.

And the paper ball? People suddenly go nuts and bid on the domain papierkugel.de, several paper balls were put on ebay and it remains to be seen how many paper balls the Bremen fans will through on the pitch on Sunday. But the fateful paper ball was given to Bremen’s manager Klaus Allofs who promised to provide a spot for it in the Werder-museum next to the now possible UEFA-Cup trophy.