For football fans such as myself, the weekend is clearly mapped out. Either you go to the stadium to cheer on your team, or if you can’t make it, you watch the game live on television. If you’re forced to do the latter, you make sure that you watch with fellow supporters of the same club, avoiding rival fans and people who aren’t interested in football and will talk through the game. Essentially, you try to spend the weekend cocooned away from both fans of other faiths and soccer atheists: I manage it quite well, and it’s great!

The 13th match day of this Bundesliga season was not short on surprising events: there was the 4:0 thrashing that Schalke 04 dished out to Werder Bremen, with Raul really giving us a great show; then there was another 4:0 hammering, with TSG Hoffenheim playing away at Frankfurt and beating them senseless – not many saw that one coming. Meanwhile, more predictably, Borussia Dortmund stayed at the top of the league following a 2:1 victory away at Freiburg, even if this was more luck than skill.

This week, our Bundesliga blogger Stefan decided to follow HSV, the team he supports, to their away game in Cologne. Watch this video of the tenth match day this season to get an idea of what the atmosphere is like in German football stadia – and to find out whether Stefan gets to celebrate a victory with the other HSV supporters.

If you want to see the goals in the Köln-HSV match, click here:

It was the fourth match-day, and in this year’s Bundesliga, that could only mean one thing: derby time! In Wolfsburg, Gelsenkirchen and Hamburg too, neighbouring clubs lined up against each other, and it is this last local clash that really stood out. After all, it had been 48 years since the city rivals HSV and St. Pauli had met on the latter’s home turf at Millerntor. Up until this point, all meetings between the two teams had always ended up being relocated to HSV’s far bigger stadium at Volkspark.

There’s one thing my coach never tired of saying to me: “Hau den Ball ins Tor hinein!” – best translated with: “Just slam it into the back of the net!” Or maybe women say to you: “Hmm, I just loooove football players…”? Maybe she does – or maybe she just likes their money. Whatever the case, football players don’t seem to have any trouble attracting women.

Tastes have changed. Before, it was your Formula 1 racing-drivers that got the girls; it was all fast cars, fast guys and even faster babes. You had drivers like Jackie Stewart, Nelson Piquet, Jody Scheckter, and Mario Andretti – proper playboys for the tabloid press. Nowadays, though, your average Formula 1 racer is nothing more than a boy without the play, the kind of clean-shaven goody-two-shoes you could introduce to your maiden aunt: just look at Sebastian Vettel, Nico Rosberg, Michael Schumacher or Lewis Hamilton. Not one of them has even a whiff of scandal on them – boring!

This was a match day to remember. A weekend that produced more memorable moments than a trip to a Kodak factory. Spectacular goals, a couple of surprise results, a last-minute penalty miss, a last-minute winner and a new league leader made for compelling viewing.

Yet no matter how many good matches there were, the stand-out moment of the weekend was produced by 1 FC Köln. The team from the carnival capital traveled to Munich, a place they had not won at in over a decade. The bookmaker’s odds hovered close to 10/1. Christoph Daum had never even won there as a coach. It seemed like a foregone conclusion.