They didn't want to leave the place of bliss and celebrated their season triumph two hours after the final whistle in the guest cabin of VfB Stuttgart.
The charter plane, who brought the Bundesliga team of DSC Arminia Bielefeld back home, had to wait a little longer before the team checked in after their improvised class stay party in the state.
The team that almost all experts had prophesied that it would be relegated again immediately.
Think! The bulky and tight-knit Ostwestfalen, who won the second division last season with ten points ahead of Stuttgart, believed in themselves on the day of the decision and trusted in their own quality. The 2-0 victory, which drove away the last doubts, was the logical consequence of a concentrated performance, underpinned by the greater will of Bielefeld against an opponent who could no longer mobilize the last reserves at the end of the season.
When scoring goals, the Bielefeld captain and record goal scorer Fabian Klos was asked, who seemed rather inconspicuous and apparently a little nervous at work until his penalty opportunity after Ahamada's foul on the Japanese Okugawa sprinting away.
But not in the 66th minute after he and his trusted colleague Andreas Voglsammer had made eye contact.
"Nobody deserves that like you"
"It looked like: Vogi, you shoot," the Upper Bavarian interpreted the searching look of his Lower Saxony partner. “But I told him you were our number one and you hadn't been fouled. Shoot him in, nobody deserves the shot to happiness like you. ”The club icon was“ aware of the importance of this shot ”, did as he was told - and remained cold the moment the door to staying in class opened wide for the first time to the heart, although he had previously felt a "high pulse".
The penalty taker, who was infallible until he missed the penalty shot against Schalke a few weeks ago, was there when he was needed, "loaded" goalkeeper Kobel and shot the ball flat and unsustainable into the left corner of the goal. It was the signal to take advantage of the momentum and to quickly step up. The Japanese Ritsu Doan did that six minutes later when he had initiated a Bielefeld rapid attack, was played by Voglsammer with a hoe, had played two Stuttgarters and shot the ball past Kobel to make it 2-0 for Bielefeld into the net.
This paved the way for the Arminen im Ländle's end-of-season party. However, the 33-year-old Klos, who had been in Bielefeld for ten years and had risen to become a club icon there, needed a few moments to himself when the game was over and his teammates were already in a party mood. The leader, replaced shortly before the end, sat on the bench and cried - with happiness and because "something comes up when you reach your goal".
The previous weeks, in which he had also, presumably successfully, fought for a renewed extension of his contract with his heart club, had taken him so much that he had to indulge his emotions. When the tears had dried up and deep satisfaction had given way, Klos found the seasonal earnings of this first season in the first division after eleven years in the second and third division "at least comparable to the promotion in the previous season".
Accordingly, the winners of the day cheered the most important victory of their Bundesliga comeback season. They gave their trainer Frank Kramer the usual beer shower on such occasions, who replaced the tired-looking ascension hero Uwe Neuhaus at the beginning of March, and he enjoyed the moment like a well-deserved refreshment. The coach stabilized the mainly defensive Arminia (eleven games to zero) around the fabulous goalkeeper Stefan Ortega Moreno and the young defense chief Amos Pieper so sustainably that the Bielefeld team lost only one of the eight games at the end of the season.
The young man from Allgäu openly admitted that this had been the biggest day of his not particularly noticeable career so far.
“It's a sensation for me.
I am incredibly proud to be part of this group. "
The managing directors Samir Arabi, who is responsible for the sporting part, and Markus Rejek, who has the commercial management, had to make a lot out of little in order to make Arminia for the Bundesliga.
The club, which was renovated after economically turbulent years in 2018, entered the economically unequal race with the established competition with the mini-act of 22 million euros for the team - and still held its own.
True to the motto invented by Arabi that the Bielefeld people had to compete with a "rubber dinghy against seventeen motor boats". At the destination, the cleverly navigated rubber dinghy was ahead of three supposedly brisk competitors. No wonder that the people of Bielefeld adorned themselves with a blue T-shirt to celebrate the day. Then two paddles and the group praise for the Bielefeld breakwater: “Well paddled!”.