Bayern Munich celebrate winning the Bundesliga. Photograph: Joerg Koch AFP/Getty Images

TV screens were getting positively drenched by salty bodily fluids on Saturday, you couldn’t move for all the money shots: everybody was crying, everywhere.

In Hamburg, Huub Stevens, the Bundesliga’s best-loved Dutch Gruffalo, shed a few tears after his last match in charge at Hamburg. His charges behaved like most kids at the last day of school. They went on a (goalscoring) rampage and flattened poor Karlsruhe 7-0 to secure a Uefa Cup spot. Was Stevens happy with the goal-fest? Of course he wasn’t. “I’d have preferred it if we scored some of the goals over the course of the last few weeks instead”, the unhappy camper from Kerkrade griped, one last time.

Stevens, an unapologetic clean-sheet fetishist used to say that “the zero has to stand”. Stand it did, but on the wrong side of the equation, and a bit too often: six games in the last eight without any Hamburg goals simply wasn’t good enough to get into the Champions League. The HSV president Bernd Hoffmann, however, was magnanimous in his praise. “Huub saved us from relegation and took us into the Uefa Cup twice,” he said. “We thank him for that. He’ll always have a place in the history books and in our hearts.” Awwww. Or aarrgh, maybe.Nürnberg, meanwhile, conducted themselves exactly like the bespectacled, sexually adventurous girl in the old German joke who ends up with smudged glasses: they’d seen it all coming but just couldn’t get out of the way in time. Their 2-0 defeat at home to Schalke followed a depressingly inevitable course: they played well, really well at times, but the opposition scored. Two goals from Schalke’s Brazilian centre-back Bordon consigned the Franconians to a historic seventh relegation from the Bundesliga. That’s one way to the get into the history books. No one’s ever won the cup one season and gone down the next before, either. Trust Nürnberg to manage that.

“The club is an idiot,” even their own fans often say, in recognition of their team’s propensity to somehow get everything wrong. That didn’t make it much easier to stomach, though: plenty of fans and even some of the players were crying in the easyCredit-Stadion. The combustible owner, Michael A Roth, stayed calm, for a change, which should be good news in the long run. The manager Thomas von Heesen and sporting director Martin Baader will be given the chance to get Nürnberg straight up again. At least until the first couple of defeats come next August.Dortmund didn’t feel like waiting that long. On Monday, they gave Thomas “LMAO” Doll his marching orders. Borussia’s football had been an embarrassment all season, a finish in 13th place simply unacceptable, and Doll’s enthusiasm on local dancefloors had sadly never been that visible on the training pitch. No tears here. Doll will be succeeded by Jürgen Klopp.

In Munich, though: a veritable deluge. The manager Ottmar Hitzfeld was overcome with emotion when the club said goodbye to him with a bouquet of flowers for a second time in four years. He cried and cried and cried. No one had seen this stern-faced, incredibly composed man in such a state before. Soon, the whole stadium was moved to tears, too. Hitzfeld, it transpired later, cried tears of joy. “The years here were very hard”, he said. “They were tiring and unnerving. I’m really happy I managed to see it through and leave after another successful season.” At Bayern, winning everything was the minimum requirement. The 59-year-old, a thoroughly decent man, was consumed by the pressure. As the Swiss national manager, he’ll have a more comfortable job. We wish him well.

Bayern’s 4-1 cake-walk against a Hertha side eager not to interfere in any way – they had the chance to get into the Uefa Cup the Manchester City way, via the Fair Play rankings, and succeeded in doing so - was incidentally also the last ever game for referee Markus Merk. The dentist from Kaiserslautern who took elocution lessons when players made fun of his high-pitched voice, blew his whistle for the last time and swapped shirts with Oliver Kahn after the match.Kahn looked great in the yellow official’s top, like a buff canary with a Roman statue for a head. “The Titan” (Bild) didn’t cry. Of course he didn’t. “Maybe in a few days, maybe,” he said over a glass of bubbly in the press conference, still chewing his gum, still looking pensively for answers in the middle-distance. His 557th Bundesliga match saw him bid farewell to years spent in a dark tunnel of pressure and insane ambition to succeed.

In an interview to promote his new book Erfolg Kommt von Innen (Success Comes From the Inside) he cited Rambo and 80s soap Dallas as an inspiration. Winning was his dream, very early on. As a six-year-old, Kahn’s hero was Scrooge McDuck. He bought a walking stick with his pocket-money and instructed his mum to fill up the bathtub with coins. “A classic case for child counselling,” wrote Der Spiegel. Instead he went into goal, where many similarly deranged young Germans have traditionally found refuge.A fantastically insightful article in Taz, the left-leaning newspaper from Berlin, appreciated him as “an aesthete of the anal” who’s one and only concern was to make sure that nothing came in at the back. Kahn never enjoyed “the striker’s orgasmic joy at scoring” - because he was the one getting shafted. “I’m the arse,” Kahn said about conceding a goal. “A feeling of loneliness grabs hold of me.” Who but a certified maniac wants to fight such an existentialist battles against the odds?

Germany’s obsession with big, strong, mad keepers tells us a lot about the nation’s psyche. At the height of our football crisis in 2002, Kahn became an icon. We weren’t good enough to score against the big boys then - but he made at least sure that Germany wasn’t getting done. “Coming from behind,” the British concept of enjoying a win most when shafting the opposition was preceded by getting shafted first, never caught on in German football. We’re just not homoerotic enough, you see.Results: Stuttgart 2–2 Bielefeld (the “champions of coincidence” settle for the Intertoto Cup), Bochum 1–2 Rostock, Leverkusen 0–1 Bremen (Werder come good after a horror season), Hamburg 7–0 Karlsruhe, Bayern 4-1 Hertha, Dortmund 2–4 Wolfsburg, Frankfurt 4–2 Duisburg, Hannover 4–0 Cottbus, Nürnberg 0–2 Schalke.

About this articleCloseThis article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Friday May 23 2008. It was last updated at 12:57 on May 23 2008.

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