Mad Jens, mad world

By Emerald Gao
Written on June 30, 2007

A little while ago, Jens Lehmann's cheat sheet from the World Cup was entered into a German history museum. It's an interesting little artifact, a bit bittersweet to look at for an Argentina fan, but still one of the more fascinating minutia from the competition.

I love how it's written on hotel stationery, how crinkled the paper is and how faded the penmarks are, and how he wrote down the shirt numbers of some of the players. I'm strangely happy now that I've actually seen it; before, the list was merely a piece of folklore, one that happened to fell an entire team. But physical evidence of a myth -- that's always impressive, no matter how heavy the heart feels after seeing it.

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