Sunday 30th September 2012 ko 11.00am

Kreisliga 2 Süd München

SpVgg THALKIRCHEN FREUNDSCHAFT 3 (Broch 24 43 Stoier 90)

SV ISTIKLAL MÜNCHEN 2 (Durmaz 47 77)

Att 47 (h/c)

Entry €4

Programme FREE

Badge €3

From Wackersbergstraße to the Bezirkssportanlage Thalkirchner Straße, is a mere one kilometre, so making kick-off shouldn’t have been a problem, except parking proved to be a real issue. You don’t expect the car park to be full for a Sunday morning Kreisliga (local league)  game, but when we worked out how to locate to the football pitch (use the entrance marked 207) we arrived a few seconds before kick-off. The fripperies of programmes and badges were easily obtained, but what required our immediate attention was the ground. With over 5000 grounds between us, none of the four of us had seen anything like it before.

It’s hard to know where to start with a description. The main entrance makes you immediately think of a leisure centre, but there’s far more to it than that. The principle activity, and the cause of the packed car park was a massive climbing centre. The entire time we spent here was punctuated by the occasional yelp as someone made a mistake, and fell to be caught by their harness and a rope. There’s a terrace bar, with a small floodlit pitch in front. The football club’s administration is squirrelled into an office under the bar.

All this seems to be a recent construction, as it has cut into one end of a massive amphitheatre, one too big for either football or athletics. We pondered as to its background with no success. There was also the task of collecting the line-ups, not easy with no press present. Lee taught me the word,  “Mannshaftsaufstellung,” or team line-ups, in German, so I strolled purposely into the referee’s room at half-time armed with my new word, and collected the relevant information. Mind you, referee Benjamin Klinke spoke sufficient English to make the word redundant!

As was the case with our previous game. the visitors were an ethnic team, this time Turkish, with the occasional Serb thrown in, and they certainly added colour, if colour were needed given the surroundings. The standard was noticably better and faster from our early game, with the level two notches up the pecking order.

From speaking to club officials it was clear that Thalkirchen are very proud of forward Markus Broch and he didn’t disappoint, scoring twice in the first half, the first a magnificent free kick, the second a fine strike from distance. The hosts seemed to have the game sewn-up, but all that changed in the second half.

The Turks emerged after the break noticably fired up, and the downside of that was the continual whingeing to the referee. Full back Baris Ucar was lucky not to be dismissed, and was subsituted for his own good. On the upside, Istiklal forced their way back into the game, Can Durmaz beating the offside trap twice to level the game. The whining was irritating, so when in stoppage time a free kick was swung in from the left and defender Tobias Soier beat Istiklal keeper Bekir Bulut to the ball to head home we allowed ourselves a smile. It was justice of a fashion, even if Bulut had no reason to come that far for a ball he couldn’t possibly have reached.

The visitors whinged as there wasn’t even enough time for a kick-off and things threatened to get ugly as the teams trooped off. We didn’t stop to watch, there was another game to see. So much to see, so little time to do it in.