What do Werner Hansch, Norbert Dickel, Christian Arbeit, and Arnd Zeigler have in common? Easy — they were and still are legendary stadium announcers. Into this illustrious line one could perhaps soon also insert Michael Trippel, the stadium announcer for 1. FC Köln. At least he had his shiny times, his famous fifteen minutes on Saturday evening during the “Effzeh” match against Borussia Dortmund.
There he used his elevated position to comment on the decisions of the refereeing duo, or rather the so-called “Kölner Keller,” i.e., the Video Assistant Referee team (VAR), in his own way. There was a red card for the Cologne player Jahmai Simpson-Pusey towards the end of the first half after VAR intervention, whereas after a fairly clear handball by Dortmund’s Yan Couto in stoppage time there was no VAR intervention. Referee Daniel Siebert had not acted in either case.
One — as it turned out, a red card that warranted comment with “Pfui, widerlich” — is, of course, easy to call borderline; in general, stadium announcers (why are there so few female stadium announcers? Only SC Freiburg and Bayer Leverkusen have some in Petra Dahl and Julica Goldschmidt) should be bound by an unwritten code of fairness.
However, indignation is on the rise in the land of outrage as well. In this case, it concerns dubious decisions — not only despite VAR, but sometimes even through it. Penalty decisions in favor of the big clubs are particularly conspicuous; at the front is the industry leader, yet Borussia Dortmund also seems to be favored by VAR from time to time.
And yes, every decision matters — on the one hand Bayern would probably not have pulled away so far if Harry Kane hadn’t repeatedly had the opportunity to pad his goal tally with penalties; on the other hand, for a club like 1. FC Köln, facing relegation, every point matters, and a 2-2 in the dying minutes would have done wonders for confidence as well.
And a stadium announcer like Arnd Zeigler naturally has completely different possibilities to comment on what happened; he enjoys the privilege of his own television show — which he also uses for necessary commentary against the VAR mischief. We’ll see whether he shows solidarity with his colleague.
