"Don’t like sitting by the window": Ginter on the team bus attack | OneFootball

Everything was set for a football festival. On April 11, 2017, Borussia Dortmund hosted AS Monaco in the Champions League quarterfinals. But the day ended in catastrophe. Those involved are still struggling with the consequences today.

Luck in misfortune: Only two of the 28 occupants suffered physical injuries. Defender Marc Bartra (35/now with Betis Sevilla) sustained a broken arm and foreign object injuries. An accompanying police officer suffered acoustic trauma.

Despite the brutal attack, the motto was: The show must go on. Already the next day, a still shocked Dortmund team took to the field and lost 2-3 to the Monegasques. “We are not animals, we are people who have families and children at home. I feel like an animal, not like a human being,” protested defender Sokratis (37/retired) at the time—but to no avail. Since the second leg in the Principality was also lost 1-3, BVB was eliminated.

The effects of the attack are also long-term, as Matthias Ginter (32/SC Freiburg) now openly shares in the podcast “Copa TS.” The central defender was set to leave Dortmund at the end of that fateful season and move to Borussia Mönchengladbach. “Windows shattered and the bus filled with smoky gray. I thought: Okay, that’s it,” he is quoted as saying by BILD.

“Difficult to get past there”

“A few people shouted: ‘Get down!’,” he recalled. “I thought, now someone’s coming in, this is a robbery. That was my first thought. There was no longer the feeling of getting out quickly. Instead, you feel a bit helpless on the bus. There are only two doors. And if someone comes in, it’s difficult to get past them.”

Photo: Getty Images

Ginter feared for his life. “Those were moments when you think, it doesn’t really help anymore to try to hide or anything. But then you just intuitively do whatever you can to try to save yourself.”

He still feels the effects. “There are moments when it comes back, even nowadays. These days, I don’t like to sit by the window on the team bus,” reports the Freiburg native. But he says he has “no major problems anymore,” Ginter explains, but has “learned to live with it, that it’s part of life.”

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇩🇪 here.