Germany vs. Turkey

I was woken by a brutally loud blast at 8am this morning - it was so loud that it shook me from my dreams and forced me – thoroughly confused – to spend the first few seconds of my day considering a very unappealing scenario:

A bomb just went off – Cologne has descended into civil war, maybe to do with the football game tonight – Germany vs. Turkey in the semi-final of the European Championship; the German fans got drunk the night before and started attacking Turkish passers-by, which quickly turned into a brutal fight between Turkish and German fans, fought in the streets of this ‘civilized’ town (during the Roman Empire, the part of Cologne that lies west of the Rhine had been the last bastion of civilisation, with “Barbaria” beginning just across the river on the eastern shore), then in the early hours of the morning, as the fighting went on above ground, now engulfing most of the centre of town with increasingly heavy artillery shattering shop windows and coffee bars, the leaders of the more radical streaks of German hooligans met in a secret location underground to plan a strategic attack on the Turkish forces; by 5am they had established contact with Al-Qaeda and convinced Osama that the Turkish were opponents of Islam, merely because of their efforts to join the EU, not to mention the wide prohibition of headscarves in many public institutions; Osama agreed it was time to take action against these infidels who called themselves Muslims and that the Germans, who had always been supporters of Islam, had kindly hosted his Hamburg clique pre-9/11 and had opposed the war on Iraq, were good partners in such an undertaking. Himself a fan of football, he was quickly convinced that this was a good occasion for such a historic strike. He quickly promised to send one of his best skilled and keenest suicide bombers, Hamadi Ezzudin, who had been waiting for a call like this since his recent release from Guantanamo Bay, where he had been kept innocently and without charges for 19 months after he was caught in a sex cinema in Kabul in early 2003. Hamadi, based in an undisclosed European capital, arrived within two hours and was ready for action. They chose breakfast time as the best time to strike. The German hooligan leaders were nervous when Hamadi insisted on recording his martyr’s message on camera before going on the mission. But after he started calling them opponents to the will of God and threatening first to call it all off and then to blow himself up there and then, they agreed to film him with the Qur’an in one hand and a gun in the other, making his last statement and expressing his happiness to be in paradise soon. The Germans had to promise to send one videotape to Hamadi’s family in Afghanistan and one to Al-Jazeera. Finally at 7:30am all was ready and they took him in an armoured vehicle through the devastated town to a safe place near the front lines, where the fighting was still going on. Hamadi – an experienced terrorist, naturally carrying his Kalashnikov by his side – didn’t look all that different from the Turkish football fans who had turned into rebel fighters over night, especially after he bought a Turkish flag from one of the many shops suddenly selling football attire and gimmicks. He easily mixed with the thousands of angry Turks who were just struggling in a last attempt to take the main stadium and it was here where he blew himself up, tearing apart the bodies of hundreds of Turkish and German fighters and waking me from my gentle sleep.

Seconds later I started dreaming up another scenario, when a very loud grumbling could be heard from the horizon and a second clasp of thunder exploded over Cologne.