I'm a happy bunny today as my team, Birmingham City, have just thrashed Reading 6-1 at home in the Championship -- English football's second tier. The club's fortunes have turned around massively since the start of November following the appointment of former defender Gary Rowett as manager. The new gaffer has so far led us to four wins, two draws and just one defeat in his first seven games in charge. (Typically, the defeat occured to Blackpool, whose new manager is our old boss Lee Clark.) Rowett took over following a disastrous 8-0 defeat at home to Bournemouth, which means that today's result does wonders for our goal difference too.

Anyway, six in German is SECHS, which rather amusingly sounds like \"sex\". I'm not saying we've been playing sexy football under Rowett, but it was an appropriate score I think. Over in Germany, meanwhile, I notice that 1860 Munich, who live rather in the shadows of the more illustrious city rivals Bayern Munich, lost 3-2 at home today ha ha. I mention 1860 because the one and only time I saw them play -- at the famous Allianz Arena no less -- the top tier of the ground was draped in a giant banner, presumably to make up for the lack of fans, with the words SECHZIG, which mean \"sixty\", covering up a large swathe of empty seats. Actually, 1860 are a bit like Birmingham in that they're currently going through a dodgy patch too, playing in the second division and still being outperformed by possibly more famous city rivals (Aston Villa in our case).

As things stand, though, 1860 are doing much worse in the league than we are, currently third from bottom, lying in place SECHZEHN, or sixteen, in the table. We're 15th in a much bigger league of 24 teams so thing are definitely looking up for us. What I'd love would be for the run to carry on and for the Blues to end up in place SECHS in the table at the end of the season, which would get us into the play-offs and possibly back up into the Premier League.

This one's easy. Hand means "hand" of course. I guess when those Anglo-Saxon hoards came to Britain in the first millennium, it made sense for the locals to make sure they didn't muck around with those Germanic words for parts of the body - it avoids all that confusion especially if a swivel-eyed German nutter was about to chop off something that belonged to you.

But it's amazing that English and German have not diverged more on the bodily-parts front, even on spelling. So as well as Hand, other totally identical words are Finger, Arm and, er, Penis. Then there are some words that are almost the same, such as Haar, Lippe and Knie, for hair, lip and knee.

Some body parts are close relatives that you can kind of guess, like Mund, Nase and Kinn for mouth, nose and chin. But German, being German, it just can't resist having some daft, long words, the silliest culprits being Oberschenkel for thigh and Unterschenkel for calf. I'll explain those in more detail another time.

But back to hand. One word I particularly like in German and which illustrates nicely its love of compound nouns is Handschuh, which literally means "hand-shoe" - a glove. Neat, huh? Then you've got Handschlag (handshake), which I also like. ­Bayern Munich president Uli Hoeness used the word "Handschlag" to great effect in this ridiculous post-match outburst from 2012, in which he was quizzed about why Bayern coach Jupp Heynkes refused to shake the hand of Frank Ribery who was substituted in a Champions League match that Bayern lost 1-0. "Hört auf mit eurem Scheiß Handschlag", bellows Höness at the interviewer, followed swiftly by a string of other insults. "Shut up about your shitty handshake."

Steady on Uli...

http://www.whoateallthepies.tv/champions_league/111918/for-fks-sake-is-this-a-boarding-school-for-girls-hoeness-riled-by-questions-after-ribery-ducks-heyncke-handshake.html