Spiel 2 and The night in "Dussel"

It has been a couple days since my last post, I am currently in Frankfurt visiting my aunt and my dad will be making a quick stopover on his way back to work. I have spent most of my time since the game travelling to Frankfurt, hanging out with my aunt or resting since I had a long night after the game.

As you may have read from the twitter feed in the sidebar; I chose to be the designated driver Saturday night since as a group of “Amis” we wanted to go out to Dusseldorf to celebrate with some of the German players from the team. As I mentioned before they don’t all live near Monchengladbach so it’s not always easy to get to hang out with some of them. I decided to drive the guys since I knew I had to be up early and figured it will save us all a little bit of money; little did I know it would turn into a mess.

So we all piled into one of our “Mav-mobiles” and drove into Dusseldorf to meet up with some of the guys in the Dusseldorfer Altstadt. Only problem was none of us really knew how to get there. Long story short after a few “detours”; we found a parking garage near the Altstadt and parked the car in there. I saw a sign that said the garage closes at 3am, probably mentioned it quickly but I don’t think anyone heard so off we were to party for a few hours.

With 3 am approaching we slowly started to wrap up the night (or so we thought) and headed back to the garage. We weren’t in any real hurry since some of the German guys said I must have misread the signs since usually the garages don’t close.

As we approached the garage, we all realized the entrance and exit had been closed off with giant metal gates. After cussing around for a few minutes trying to figure out a genius way to get to the car; we arrived at an executive decision that since two of the “Amis” had locked there keys in car when we parked it, that they would stay until 9am and drive the car back to Monchengladbach. The rest of us were going to walk to the train station and take the next train at 430am home.

We got lucky and called some friends that were out with us and they came and picked us up. You would think the drive would be easy going from there but instead the gas tank was already on empty so we needed to find a gas station pronto to fill up if not we would be pushing our way home. We then spent the next hour coasting through all the little villages on the way back to ‘Gladbach trying to find a gas station that would be open. We drove by I think 7 or 8 stations that were all closed, until the 8th or 9th was open. I have never been stranded in a car that ran out of gas but I was quite sure that Saturday night was going to be the first time.

I got home just past 5am and then had to pack up my stuff for the trip to Frankfurt. I climbed into bed around 6am and took a nap for about 3 hours.
Waking up following a game generally means sleeping in and sleeping off the bruises as well as the celebratory events of the night before. I got up and made it to the train station contrary to what my body and mind really wanted to do which was sleep for a few more hours. The ride to Frankfurt was easy and I was grateful that I reserved a seat on the long stretch of the train ride since it was a packed train and I was in no mood to be standing for that part of the trip.

Arriving in Frankfurt, I needed to transfer to a local regional train to make it to my aunt’s house, unfortunately in my zombie like state I boarded the right train but heading in the wrong direction. I didn’t realize it for a couple of stops and then had to get off and missed the train going back in the other direction so I had to wait on an empty platform for 30minutes without any other people around wondering how long I would be waiting to get back in the right direction.

After all that I made it to my aunts and took the rest of the day off so to speak.

Here is a quick overview of the second game as well as a couple pictures from the game.





This team was supposed to be one of the better opponents we will play as well as they were calling out our organization in some press releases so before the game even started there were already some “war of words” to build the anticipation of the game.

The game was a fairly close battle until late in the 3rd quarter when our offense continued scoring and our defense was making stop after stop. Final Score: 42-21

This game was more of a physical battle then the previous one and it also involved some cheap shots, which we were expecting with the way the game was going and the constant verbal jousting between both teams.

Personally, I didn’t have a statistically impressive game (3 catches for 22 yards, 1 TD) but I think I had an effect on how the defensive backfield was positioned to play our offense. I generally had two defensive backs playing a bracket over top of me allowing the closer defensive back to play any short routes aggressively knowing he has help over top.

They tried to blitz us a lot and our QB and running back both had success running for yards and TDs. Our running back is currently leading the league in quite a few categories so it will be interesting to see if teams will try to load the box and then hopefully that will allow me some more opportunities to make some plays outside; if not who cares as long as the wins keep going up on the board.

I think that’s all for now I am off to get some sightseeing done in Frankfurt as well as getting some shopping done for the boys back in ‘Gladbach trying to find some shoes to play on our Astroturf at the Hockeypark.

Let me know if you want more football details or anything else.