With Kompany in hospital, Bayern's cones go out to 26 territories
With Vincent Kompany in hospital for examinations, Bayern Munich's equipment manager will run a twenty-six-cone drill the Bundesliga is treating as a title decider.
Bayern Munich keep their training cones in a mesh cage beside the second pitch at Säbener Strasse, stacked in towers of twenty-six. The number is not official. It is how high a man can stack cones before the Munich wind gets a vote.
On Sunday those towers become the most important objects in European football. Bayern confirmed the first team will train while head coach Vincent Kompany remains in hospital, where the club says he is undergoing thorough examinations after feeling unwell on Friday. The session will be run by Dieter Haubold, the club's equipment manager of nineteen years.
The hospital part is not a story. It is a man being checked over by doctors, and the club will tell us when there is something to tell. Everyone has said the right things, and so will we: get well, coach.
The cones are the story. Haubold has never run a session in his life. He has, by his own count, placed roughly four hundred thousand cones on grass, and on Sunday he gets to decide where they go.
The drill
Bayern's plan is one drill. Twenty-six cones, laid in a spiral that tightens toward the centre circle, with the squad dribbling inward until the last man has nowhere left to go. Haubold calls it the Snail. The players, we are told, call it something else.
"I have watched coaches come and go," Haubold said on Saturday, standing in the cage with a cone under each arm. "They all put the cones in straight lines. Straight lines are for parking. Football happens in a curve."
He then set down the cones, picked them up again, and set them down two centimetres to the left. That is the kind of hard-nosed attention to the small stuff you see once a generation.
The league reacts
The Bundesliga did not treat Sunday's session as a training session. It treated it as a fixture. League spokeswoman Annika Dreher confirmed the Snail will be shown on the league's streaming service with a full pre-drill show and two co-commentators.
"We have had requests from twenty-six broadcast territories," Dreher said. "That is more than the Supercup. Frankly it is more than we expected for twenty-six cones, but the market has spoken."
UEFA went further. A statement from the governing body noted the drill would take place on the same weekend as several Champions League group matches and asked clubs to "show flexibility" so their players could watch. Nobody has yet asked which Champions League matches. Nobody seems to care.
"Straight lines are for parking. Football happens in a curve."
Borussia Dortmund declined to comment, which would mean more if a Dortmund scout had not been photographed in the Säbener Strasse car park on Saturday night with a pair of binoculars and a sandwich. Bayern security moved him on. He left the sandwich.
The men in the middle
Inside the Bayern dressing room the mood is said to be steely. One senior player, speaking through the club's press office, said the squad had agreed to "respect the spiral" and would not take shortcuts across the grass between cones.
"The spiral is the spiral," the player said. "You go around. That is what Dieter wants. We owe Dieter that much."
German football pundit Markus Vollrath, who once played nine minutes for Hansa Rostock, said the Snail was the most important tactical event in Bavaria since the invention of the sweeper. "You can win a league with a bad spiral," he said on Sky Deutschland. "You cannot win a Sunday."
Vollrath then rated each of the twenty-six cones individually. Cone fourteen, which sits on a slight rise in the turf, was given a seven. Cone twenty-six, the final cone in the centre circle, was given a nine and described as "nerveless".
What happens after
Bayern also have a league match this week. The club's press office mentioned it near the bottom of a statement about Sunday's drill, in the paragraph after the one about parking arrangements for broadcast trucks. Three reporters asked about the opponent. Nobody wrote the name down.
Haubold, for his part, is not thinking about Sunday at all. He is thinking about Monday morning, when twenty-six cones will be lying in the dew and some poor soul has to carry them back to the cage.
"The drill is the easy part," he said. "Anybody can lay cones out. The real test is whether you pick them up."
He paused, looked at the empty cage, and said the quiet part out loud. "The coaches never pick them up."
Twenty-six cones. One spiral. One man who has waited nineteen years to bend a line. Whatever happens in the Champions League this week, and we are told something will, it is hard to see it mattering more than that.
