Bundesliga restarts with no fans, Haaland celebrates alone

BERLIN (AP):

Erling Haaland scored the Bundesliga’s first goal in more than two months and then celebrated.

Alone.

The 19-year-old’s Borussia Dortmund teammates stayed away, mindful of the strict hygiene measures amid the coronavirus pandemic, as Germany’s football season resumed in unprecedented conditions yesterday.

Dortmund defeated Schalke 4-0 in the first Ruhr derby to be played in an empty stadium. Calls and shouts from coaching staff and players, and the thud of the sanitised ball being kicked, reverberated around the mainly deserted stands.

Players had been warned to keep their emotions in check, and to desist from spitting, handshakes and hugging, in a game keenly watched by the rest of the football world hoping to restart their own leagues.

Haaland celebrated his opening goal with a restrained dance as his teammates stayed back.

“It’s hard,” midfielder Julian Brandt said. “But that’s the way it is now. We try to stick to the rules.”

Brandt set up Raphael Guerreiro before the break and Thorgan Hazard after it. Hazard celebrated alone in front of the Westfalenstadion’s south terrace, where normally the club’s ‘Yellow Wall’ of almost 25,000 fervent fans would be standing.

Haaland set up Guerreiro to seal the result as Dortmund cut the gap on leaders Bayern Munich to a point. Bayern are due to play at Union Berlin today.

Team staff, and players who didn’t start, wore masks. Substitutes took their positions in the stands, rather than beside the field as customary, while balls and seats were disinfected.

Pre-game television interviews were conducted with long poles holding microphones and participants keeping their distance.

“It’s quite surreal,” Dortmund chief executive Hans Joachim Watzke told Sky TV. “I’ve received messages from all over the world in the last couple of hours that everybody is watching and then you go through the city and there’s nothing going on.”

In other games: Hertha Berlin won 3-0 at Hoffenheim in coach Bruno Labbadia’s first game in charge; Freiburg drew at Leipzig 1-1; Paderborn drew at Fortuna Dusseldorf 0-0; Eintracht Frankfurt 1 Borussia Monchengladbach 3 and Wolfsburg won 2-1 at Augsburg, where the home side’s new coach Heiko Herrlich was forced to watch from the stands after breaking quarantine to buy toiletries. Herrlich will only return after twice testing negative for the virus.

Celebrations were muted throughout, with only Hertha’s players appearing to overstep calls for restraint.