'I was allowed to experience a dream: the miracle of Werder', said Johan Micoud. 'This is the biggest of all Werder miracles', said Frank Baumann.

'People have often talked about 'Miracles of the Weser' in the past. But what we have achieved now, that is the true miracle', said Klaus Allofs.

The two Germans, Werder Bremen's defensive midfielder Baumann and the club's business manager Allofs, were directly referring to a well-known phrase that was coined to cover Bremen's many improbable comebacks in the European Cup competitions. (Some of those 'Miracles of the Weser', named after the river that runs through Bremen, have been detailled in this very space in October of 2002, so we don't need to reiterate them.)

However, the Frenchman, playmaker Micoud, probably wasn't aware how closely Germans connect the term with Bremen when he used the word 'miracle' to describe his side's championship-winning campaign.

From his point of view, he simply told it as it is.

But is he right, is this a miracle? Difficult to say. See, the first time the word 'miracle' cropped up in connection with Werder this season was on August 7, 2003.

That day, the cover of kicker magazine declared: 'No Miracle for Werder'. That was because the Germans had only drawn 1-1 with the Austrian club Superfund Pasching in the semi-finals of the Intertoto Cup.

In the first leg, Bremen had been taken to pieces by this unfancied team (currently third in Austria, 12 points behind the league leaders).

It was 3-0 at halftime, 4-0 in the end. Bremen missed a penalty and substituted the woeful Ailton after 70 minutes. Micoud, who had just gone on record as saying that he saw 'a real chance for Werder to compete with Bayern and Dortmund,' was made to look like a fool and mumbled something about 'motivational problems against supposedly weaker opponents'.

Frank Baumann was shown a copy of Bremen's club magazine, in which he had named his side as the favourite for the Bundesliga title. 'This was certainly more of a gag,' he explained sheepishly.

If anybody had back then suggested that Bremen would finish ahead of Hertha Berlin, Schalke and Dortmund, let alone Bayern Munich, he would have been told that an old-fashioned, run-of-the-mill miracle would not suffice to achieve that.

A whole family-size pack of them, that's what was needed. And, it seems, what they got.

Yet there has to be something inexplicable about a miracle, and you can't really say that about the Werder team.

Whenever I saw them play over the last couple of years, they always looked like a good side that needed only little things to become really good.

Last season, for instance, they won all four games against Bayern and Stuttgart, yet were resigned to the Intertoto Cup because they managed to lose against Cottbus, Wolfsburg or Hannover at home.

One of the little things they got this season was the centre back Valerien Ismael from Strasbourg. Here was a Frenchman few people had ever heard of even though he was already 28 years old when Werder loaned him out.

But maybe his stunning season should not have been that much of a surprise, because Allofs, who used to play for Marseille and Bordeaux, knows French football and French footballers very well, as he's proved when he made the Micoud deal in September of 2002.

Another little thing was that Ailton ran rampant, and while you could protest and say 27 goals so far don't constitute a 'little thing', it's not quite as if this goal deluge came out of the blue. Ailton scored 16 in both of the last two seasons, so he already was a proven finisher.

Then there was Andreas Reinke, who fled the Spanish second division to solve the goalkeeping problems that have haunted Bremen since Frank Rost left for the greener pastures of Schalke (or so he thought) in 2002.

Again, few could have predicted his solid season, yet he already had 137 Bundesliga games under his belt, among them a title-winning season with Kaiserslautern, when he joined Werder.

If the accumulation of those little things constitutes a miracle ­ good, I'm willing to concede that. Yet the true miracle probably happened somewhere else, and the mentioning of Ailton's heroics and Reinke's trustworthiness swiftly lead us there ­ to Bayern Munich.

Before the season began, there were very few doubts surrounding Bayern, practically the only one was how quickly Roy Makaay would manage the transition from one team to another and from Spanish to German football.

Well, 23 goals answer that. The last Bayern player who scored at least roughly that many was Roland Wohlfarth ­ 13 years ago (and two goals less)!

To think that Bayern found themselves such an awesome striker and are nonetheless out of the race with two games still to play, that must be the true miracle. And this one is indeed, to a degree, inexplicable.

The game on Saturday basically summed everything up. Kahn blundered yet again to gift Werder the lead, after which Bayern collapsed ­ just as they had done in Dortmund three weeks ago.

Coach Ottmar Hitzfeld explained this by saying: 'We couldn't cope with the pressure.' If you can be bothered to look up the column entitled 'Afraid, very afraid', you'll find that this is something I was concerned about as far back as mid-December.

Like Kahn's mistakes, this is so out of character for Bayern Munich that it leaves you hoplessly groping for explanations. And there aren't any.

Michael Ballack quietly said: 'All the things we sent their way, seem to have made us nervous, not them.' He was referring to the rah-rah talk Bayern had dished out last week to signal to the world that Bremen were gripped by the fear of winning while no-one knew better than the Munich giants how to thrive on pressure and draw strength from it.

Well, looks like they no longer do, or didn't do this year. Because they will be back next season. Barring a miracle.