By Chris Wright
There’s got to be an easier way to do that
As part of an ongoing investigation into alleged corruption within the German automobile association, ADAC, it has emerged that the Bundesliga’s current bottom side, Eintracht Braunschweig, once hired (without really telling anyone) one of the auto club’s ‘Yellow Angel’ rescue helicopters to help clear standing water from their waterlogged pitch in a bid to make it playable for a game against Dynamo Dresden back in 2006.
This from Bild:
“February 2006. Days of heavy rainfall, frozen soils. Many games of the Bundesliga had to be cancelled – not so with the second-division club in Brunswick.
“To get the [pitch] dry, the City of Brunswick sent employees with leaf blowers onto the playing field of Eintracht Braunschweig.
“When that did not work, the city called the Yellow Angel. The ADAC regional chief for Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt, Reinhard Manlik, took the matter in hand and sent the rescue helicopter “Christoph 30” as a [makeshift] hair dryer.
“The rotor blades made with his wind, so that the dried grass. Whether it achieved anything? That wasn’t reported.”
Since the revelation was made public, Braunschweig have been heavily criticised for what is quite rightly being deemed a “serious abuse of rescue equipment” by those in the know – especially as, as mentioned, many areas of Germany had been battered by days of storm winds and heavy rainfall at the time.
Oops.
(Photo: David Taylor/Bild)