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The Daily Bee (July 25th, 2017): Sven Bender injures himself in first Bayer-game

AC Milan v Borussia Dortmund - 2017 International Champions Cup China Photo by Lintao Zhang/Getty Images
  • You’ve gotta be kidding me!

Sven Bender has broken his nose in his first game for Bayer Leverkusen. Actually we all should’ve known this would happen, Sven Bender without an injury (especially a face injury) just isn’t the Manni we all know and love.

As Nuri Sahin once famously said “He’s putting his face in places where I would move back my foot”, that about sums it up. Anyway we wish Manni a good and speedy recovery and please stay healthy for once.

  • Player and coach of the year awards

In Germany the VDS (association of German sports journalists) vote every year to crown the player and coach of the year. It is a quite prestigious award in Germany that goes all the way back to 1960 when HSV-legend Uwe Seeler won it the first time.

This year the honors have been awarded to Philipp Lahm.

Lahm (242 votes) was definitely not the best player last season but he is a German legend that decided to retire after last season so the jury probably took his entire career into consideration. Is that fair? Probably not but we’ll have to live with it.

Toni Kroos (192 votes), who won the Champions League and La Liga with Real, received the second most votes and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang (120 votes) finished third.

It was a lot closer when it came to the coaches but in the end Julian Nagelsmann (273 votes) from TSG Hoffenheim won the award to become the youngest coach ever to win. Christian Streich (261 votes), SC Freiburg, finished second and Ralph Hasenhüttl (107 votes), RB Leipzig, ended up in third place.

Thomas Tuchel, Dortmund’s ex-coach finished fourth while Carlo Ancelotti, the coach that actually won the Bundesliga title finished 14th.

Daily Buzz: I saw a tweet yesterday that has me thinking. The tweet mentioned “the consensus top-5 players of all time” an then listed the following players:

Lionel Messi, Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer, Diego Armando Maradona and Johan Cruyff (not necessarily in that order)

Now I actually agree with that list, those are the top-5 I would mention but are they really the best five players of all time? Do you agree or would you change the list?