Borussia Dortmund hand Bundesliga title to Bayern Munich with Mainz draw

This time, there would be nobody else to blame. Not Pep Guardiola or Robert Lewandowski or Uli Hoeness or the referees or the authorities. Not the big players who kept leaving for fresher pastures, nor the bigger clubs who lured them there, nor the financial inequities that impelled them to do so. This time, when the full-time whistle blew with Bayern Munich on top and Borussia Dortmund in second place once again, they knew that the they had been the sole architects of their downfall.

As the full-time whistle blew on a breezy early-summer afternoon, a strange and unfamiliar noise gripped the huge Westfalenstadion: the sound of nothing at all. A silence, an emptiness, a void, an unrequited longing. Eleven years without a title will become 12, and now how many more? There were bitter tears and there will be even bitterer memories: the photographic negatives of a day on which Dortmund came, and saw, and did not conquer.

There will be recriminations too: a full and frank postmortem into the way Edin Terzic’s league-leading team mislaid virtually every single one of the traits that took them to the summit. It was impossible not to feel for those players as they laid out on the sun-soaked turf after the game, each of them choosing to sit in the shade. But equally: how is it possible for professional footballers to make this many bad decisions of this importance? How can a team simply forget who they are?

In hindsight it was remarkable just how lightly the prospect of a Dortmund collapse was being taken in the days before the game, as the parade plans were merrily being made and the souvenir T-shirts were already being printed. The fans who began queueing outside the Westfalenstadion from 6am and who made the banner reading