Pentagon Pursuit | Part 45 | Dodgy Penalty

The city of Stuttgart was awash with football fans celebrating VfB Stuttgart becoming Champions of Germany for the first time in 37 years. The fans were unanimous that Japanese manager Robaato Rasamu was the man responsible for this success, and celebrated shoulder to shoulder with their hero sinking pints of craft beer across the city’s numerous beer halls.

After a few days of celebration, Rasamu began planning to defend his Bundesliga defence and, more importantly, taking a shot at the Champions League. He moved on a few players like centre back Hashem Salari going to Inter for £30m and midfielder Havard Fuglehaug to Saudi for £20m. In their place came more potential in attacker Francisco Rivero for £7.75m from Deportivo and versatile defender Aimar Zubizarreta for £12m from Osasuna.

Bundesliga Title Defence Starts Well

Stuttgart’s improvement saw them close in on Bayern in the bookies’ eyes with title odds of 11/2 compared to Bayern’s 8/11.

Stuttgart’s Bundesliga title defence looked to be getting off to a shaky start as they trailed 1-0 to Hamburg scoring their first and only shot on 72 minutes. But they rallied with two goals in a minute through captain Pereira and attacking midfielder Serhiy Mazurenko. It was equally tight as Ángel Galeano nicked a 1-0 win at Werder Bremen but Stuttgart enjoyed a really strong start to the campaign.

The same couldn’t be said for Bayern, who lost four times in their first 11 games and found themselves lingering in 7th. That left Wolfsburg as Stuttgart’s closest challengers and a 1-1 at Wolfsburg left Rasamu’s side three points clear heading into the November international break. Striker Peter Goodwin found form in December, bagging a hat trick in a 5-0 hammering of promoted Osnabruck then a brace as they downed Kaiserslautern 3-0.

That took Stuttgart into the winter break with a nine-point lead over Wolfsburg and 10 points clear of Bayern. Goodwin leads Bundesliga with 11 goals and Galeano tops the assist chart with six.

Champions League Fixtures

Stuttgart got a relatively kind set of games with the biggest test being Liverpool away. They began with a pretty comfortable 3-0 win over Rennes, including Rivero scoring his first for the club. Rasamu’s 200th match at Stuttgart took them for his first ever trip to Anfield. Both teams had plenty of chances but it looked to be drifting to a 0-0 until the cheating referee awarded a disgrace of a penalty in the fourth minute of three added minutes to give Liverpool an unfair victory.

That miscarriage of justice gave Rasamu the fuel he needed to stick it to what he perceived as the “European elite.” They responded by thumping Olympiacos 5-0 led by Galeano’s brace and were equally dominant against Celtic but somehow only scored once through Mazurenko before a heavily rotated earned a respectable 0-0 at Villarreal. A big test of their credentials came in a visit from Man UFC, against whom Rivero gave them a great start. A clever free kick routine ended up with Carrasco, who turned and drilled home his first of the season to double the lead after an hour. But they quickly threw that advantage away to draw 2-2.