Schalke's Bundesliga agony: Champions for four minutes & 38 seconds

It had to be there, at the Parkstadion. Schalke's old ground had always been a place of drama and scandal. Its final act was no different.

For 38 years it was home. It had seen many crucial games, it had seen relegation to the second tier. There were times when "there wasn't enough money for washing powder", as Charly Neumann, long-standing team official and soul of the club, once said. There were times when paper beer cups filled with rainwater on the crumbling, never-ending steps below the high-rise floodlight masts.

On one block, the 'Nordkurve', a wild part of the stadium, stood 'the Wren', a man with a grey beard and long hair. "I always stood there," he said. "Beside me children grew up. Then they stood with their own children."

The final match played at the old Parkstadion was one of the most dramatic in German football history.

For Schalke fans, that afternoon will be discussed forever; their life stories intersect at this point. Everyone re the four minutes and 38 seconds when they were champions.

It was the stadium's very last game before closing. A brand new modern arena awaited for Schalke, who were battling with Bayern Munich to be crowned German champions.

Schalke had never won the Bundesliga - not once since the league's formation in 1963. But the beauty of that title could now at last be theirs on the season's final day. They were three points behind their rivals, but with a better goal difference.

The tabloids had labelled the week before the "seven-second shock". Schalke had gone into the penultimate matchday as leaders, but conceded in the last minute to lose at Stuttgart. Seven seconds later Munich scored against Kaiserslautern to seal their own late victory.

Beauty had given them the brush-off. On the final day, though, the Schalke fans still hoped. The sun was beating down, and you couldn't tell whether faces were red with the strain or the heat. Officially there were 65,000 spectators, but anyone who believes that figure can't have been there. The dusty coliseum was more than full and something was in the air.

General manager Rudi Assauer - not for nothing known as the 'German league's last macho man' - had become melancholic. He stood in the dugout, a cigar in one hand, wiping tears from his cheeks with the other. Radio reporter Manni Breuckmann sat down for the last time in the place where he had commentated for so many years. "I felt a relaxed atmosphere," he re. "There was no indication of the drama still to happen."

A crazy first half ended. Opponents Unterhaching went 2-0 up after 27 minutes, but Schalke dragged it back to 2-2.

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