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Marco Engelhardt celebrates with Jan Kristiansen after scoring the opening goal during the cup semi final match against Frankfurt

We have already had a closer look at Schalke, en route to winning their first championship since 1958, and Karlsruhe, about to return to the top flight after nine years. And on Tuesday night, Nuremberg reached the German FA Cup final for the first time in a quarter of a century - 71 years, 4 months and 9 days after this club had become the first-ever team to lift the trophy.

Since this is an international site, I take it for granted most of you are quite familiar with Nuremberg, if - sadly - not primarily in connection with football. Those of you who have been to World Cup games in this city have certainly seen the Nazi party rally grounds, the memorial located close to the club's home. This is a ghastly place. Even something as seemingly romantic and innocuous as the Silver Lake has dark resonances.

First, it is toxic because they used to deposit hazardous waste here in the 60s. Second, it is an artificial lake that came into being when, in 1945, ground water slowly filled a building site that was no longer used. What the Nazis had planned to build here was a typically megalomaniacal sporting arena, the so-called German Stadium, designed to hold 400,000 people.

Those last lines are probably not what you'd expect to read in a football piece, and it may even be a tad unfair to introduce Nuremberg FC thus. But it's been my experience that the vast majority of foreigners never think of football when you mention the city's name, only of those terms they have learned in school that end on 'Rallies', 'Laws' and 'Trials'. Which is why many people have reservations about the city itself they needn't have.

The Nazis came down on Nuremberg for historical and geographical reasons, not for political ones. Quite on the contrary, the NSDAP never ruled the city itself, because the party could not win a single election there!

Nuremberg had, in fact, a reputation as being liberal and even a stronghold of the reds, or at the very least the Social Democrats, mainly because it was and is an industrial city, a workingman's place.

And that finally leads us to football. After WWI, the posher places such as Leipzig, Berlin and Karlsruhe lost their grip on the game as football became the proverbial workingman's sport. That is at least the most widely accepted version of the story. However, you could make a point that this development had actually already started before the war - when Fürth, another industrial town if still partly middle-class, won the 1914 national championship, the last before the bloodshed.

Fürth (the birth-place of the avid football fan Henry Kissinger) is less than five miles away from Nuremberg, which is why those two places are often called sister cities. In the early 1920s, there was even an attempt to unite Nuremberg and Fürth - a ludicrous plan bound to fail miserably, as the rivalry between the cities borders on the pathological. Which would to a large degree shape German football during its most important decade - the 1920s, when the game finally broke through.

That's because Fürth and Nuremberg were the leading teams during those years, with the latter usually coming out on top. In the very first final after the war, in June 1920, Nuremberg beat Fürth by a score of 2-0 in Frankfurt. Even though this neutral site was some 100 miles away from Nuremberg and Fürth (a considerable distance at that time), there were 35,000 people in attendance. To put this into perspective: the previous record for a final had been 6,000. And the record for an international stood at 17,000.

	“	Deep down, everyone who's got more than just a passing interest in the game knows that Nuremberg FC are something special, no matter where they are playing. ”

What this means is that football became a truly national and truly popular sport in Germany during the years when football meant Nuremberg. As Hans Blickensdörfer, the doyen of German sports writers, pointed out: 'There are thousands of football clubs in Germany, but there is only one where all you have to call it is 'The Club'.' Indeed, Nuremberg FC are to this day usually referred to as 'Der Club' (always with the English 'c' instead of the German 'k') and its players are 'die Clubberer'. (Please imitate a thick Franconian accent and note that the 'u' is pronounced the German way.)

The nickname dates back to the 1910s and was at first restricted to Bavaria. But then the club - or 'The Club' - won the German championship no less than seven times in the 1920s, and by the end of that decade, all Germans used the moniker as a reference to the fact Nuremberg bascially had no competition. That finally changed in the 1930s, with the coming of Schalke 04 and the other  teams from the west.

But the passing of time - and Nuremberg's falling from grace - has done very little to change the great German footballing subconsciousness.

Deep down, everyone who's got more than just a passing interest in the game knows that Nuremberg FC are something special, no matter where they are playing. 

And they have been playing in some unglamourous places over the past decades. In 1968, the club won its ninth national championship (and the first in the Bundesliga), which was a record Bayern broke only twenty years later. But the very next season, the team was relegated. Also a record. Though this one still stands.

In the mid-90s, mighty Nuremberg even dropped into the third division and had to play Bayern Munich Amateurs. Or their old foes Fürth.

Incredibly, 45,000 came out to see the derby. Yes, football runs deep in this city - as epitomised by a gigantic banner the fans unfurled ahead of the Cup semi-final against Frankfurt on Tuesday. It told the players: 'Make This City's Biggest Dream Come True'. Well, they sure did. Though you can always go one step further.

Wouldn't it be something if Schalke and Nuremberg, the two most tradition-laden clubs in the country - who haven't won anything in ages and who, to top it off, also nurture a fan friendship -, would lift the two titles we're handing out in May?

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~ Listen to the tales and romanticise, how we follow the path of the hero.

^{_{I gave Elano my Porsche and now I want it back!}}

or just wasted.......