Hertha fighting against history

At noontime on Sunday, I picked up my son, as he needed a lift back home after another night of relentless partying. Even though he was clearly the worse for wear, I gave him a rundown of the previous day's Bundesliga results and what they meant for the table.

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Voronin has discovered a new lease of life.

Hangover and sleep-deprivation personified stared out of the car window for a while, then he said: "You know what? I think Hertha in first place is way more shocking than Hoffenheim in first place."

When I quoted this at the office the next morning, The Schalke Fan (see: "German football goes public", June 28, 2008) hardly bothered to look up, mumbling: "Well, of course. That goes without saying."

I mention this out of sheer self-defence. The last time I wrote about Hertha, which was more than six years ago, I received an e-mail from a lady in Huntington Beach (I'm not making this up!), who accused me of hating Hertha and bashing the club out of either mean spite, irrational anti-Berlin feelings, or a combination thereof.

True, said column did include the words "zombie", "habitual problems" and "unrealistic aspirations". It did refer to officials "who are either conceited or incompetent, often both" and called Hertha "maybe the biggest sleeping giant in all of Europe". And it did state that "many Germans have a problem with Berliners as they tend to be, well, a bit full of themselves".

But that, I felt and still feel, was not an expression of a personal and perhaps misguided opinion, it was simply stating an obvious fact.

And so I sent a few lines back to California, but never heard from the lady again. At first I thought it was because my mail mentioned the Shawn Kerri cartoons depicting the "Huntington Beach Shuffle" (an early form of circle-pit slamdancing) and she didn't know what to make of that.

Then I realised I shouldn't have written something along the lines of "I don't hate Hertha - in fact, I couldn't care less about them", as this must have made matters even worse from her point of view. But this is how most people I know feel about Hertha and (phew) I'm about to dig myself into a very deep hole here all over again, right?

It's just that most of us have grown up with Hertha stumbling from one financial crisis into the next, with Hertha grinding out a scoreless draw against Aachen in the second division in front of 1,884 disinterested onlookers in Berlin's vast Olympic stadium, with Hertha being relegated to amateur football and moving to the decrepit communal Poststadion.

In the mid-1980s, the Berlin senate even tried to merge Hertha, Tennis Borussia, Blau-Weiss 90 and Charlottenburg to create a new club that would at least stand a chance of not embarrassing this proud city. It came to nought and ten years later, then-coach Jürgen Röber famously summed up the traditional relationship between Hertha and Berlin thus: "When you talked to people about Hertha, it was as if you're discussing a disease."

So Hertha's long history of futility is one reason why it's so shocking to see them in first place. Since the inception of the Bundesliga, in 1963, the club has never led the league this late in a season, didn't even come close to doing so apart from 1975, when the team finished second.

(You sometimes read that Hertha are at the top of the table for the first time since 2006, but we're talking about the October of 2006, after a mere six games. Of which Hertha had won only two.)

The other reason why Hertha in first place is more shocking than Hoffenheim in first place is that there is no apparent reason whatsoever why they're doing so well. I don't mean the standings, as you could always argue that a good deal of that is down to Bayern's problems. No, I mean the pure figures. A year ago, Berlin had collected 31 points from 23 games and now they have 46 points, which translates into almost a 50 per cent increase. For, I repeat, no apparent reason whatsoever.

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Pantelic: An important player for the side.

This is a team without star players, unless you're from Berlin and want to make a case for Marko Pantelic (whose continued clashes with his coach would normally be considered a disruptive influence) or new arrival Andriy Voronin (whose last noteworthy moment in a Liverpool shirt was missing a penalty in a summer friendly against Hertha).

This is a team that never wins convincingly. Ten of Hertha's fourteen victories came thanks to the narrowest of margins, one goal. Even their solid wins - the 3-0 against Hannover and the 4-0 against Karlsruhe - were not what they appear to be on paper: the Hannover game was goalless for an hour and could have gone either way until the final stages, while Karlsruhe missed many opportunities to make it 1-1 before being hit on the break three times in the last fifteen minutes.

After Hertha's away win against their bogey team Energie Cottbus on Saturday, Energie's coach Bojan Prasnikar said: "We played well and we took the initiative, but we missed too many chances." He could have saved his breath, as we've heard this line from almost every coach who's played Hertha this season.

In mid-February, when Hertha (without Pantelic and thanks to a Voronin brace) had just beaten Bayern, the Munich giants' business manager Uli Hoeness, looking like a man who's just been tricked by a thimblerigger, was asked if Berlin was a contender now. "To be honest, Hertha didn't play like a team you have to fear", he said. "We just didn't take our chances, that's all."

The man standing next to him was his younger brother Dieter. He is Hertha's business manager. "I don't have any doubt that, in the end, Bayern will win the league", Dieter said with a shy but pronounced smile. I was waiting for him to throw his hands in the air, adopt a fake French accent and add something like: "It's luck, only luck. And it has to run out sooner or later, hasn't it?" In other words, he looked for all the world like a thimblerigger trying to coax his customer into risking another coin.