The paper assesses the capability of an HMM-based TTS system to produce German speech. The results are discussed in qualitative terms, and compared over three different choices of context features. In addition, the system is adapted to a small set of football announcements, in an exploratory attempt to synthesise expressive speech. We conclude that the HMMs are able to produce highly intelligible neutral German speech, with a stable quality, and that the expressivity is partially captured in spite of the small size of the football dataset.