Matchday 26

Featured Game – Eintracht Frankfurt 5-2 Union Berlin

The common cliché in football is that the game is a game of two halves. However, sometimes a game can feel like there was only one half. This was one of those occasions. Nearly all the action took place in the first 45 minutes, with six of the eventual seven goals already scored by the break – the most this Bundesliga season so far. After drawing away in Leipzig last weekend, Eintracht would have wanted to return to winning ways, but facing an unpredictable Union is never easy. The club, only promoted to the top-flight for the first time last campaign, have not experienced the second season syndrome that has seen so many teams crash back down due to a false sense of security built up by a successful first. Therefore, the half time score line would have come as something of a welcome surprise for Eintracht, however not without a series of trials and tribulations beforehand.

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Matchday 25

Featured Game – Bayer Leverkusen 1-2 Arminia Bielefeld

When you are a prestigious German football team with a history of top players and high ambitions for the season, a defeat at home to a newly promoted side struggling at the wrong end of the table would often come as a shock. However, for Champions League-chasing Bayer Leverkusen the loss was one the likes of which have been seen all too regularly this campaign. Their wastefulness in front of goal is the key feature of many of their poor performances which have left them with only four wins from their last seventeen matches in all competitions. This inconsistent run has also seen the Werkself bow out of both the DFB-Pokal to fourth-tier side Rot-Weiss Essen and the Europa League against Swiss outfit Young Boys – a tie in which they lost both legs. Therefore, a run of three games in which they would face three of the bottom four would have been welcomed with open arms by Peter Bosz, however the first of those against Arminia Bielefeld did not go to plan.

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Matchday 24

Featured Game – Bayern München 4-2 Borussia Dortmund

The whole world was watching as Matchday 24 served up the second edition of Der Klassiker this season. There was so much on the line as the battles for top spot and the Champions league places would both take exciting new turns as this game was played out. It certainly is not uncommon for a clash between these two giants of German football to have a lot riding on it, usually in trying to split them at the top of the league, with Bayern coming out on top more often than not. However, it was Leipzig that would have benefited most from a Dortmund win, as this would have kept the Red Bulls in first place after they beat Freiburg earlier that afternoon. Despite the eventual score line highlighting the fast-paced contest that it was, with chances a plenty, on face value it could have been easy to assume that Dortmund put up more of a fight than they perhaps have in previous recent encounters with Bayern. In the end, it was the home side who dominated the game in both possession and, drastically, in the shots tally at the end of proceedings as their 27 massively surpassed their opponents’ mere four attempts at goal. Nevertheless, when you have potentially the world’s most promising young attacker in your line-up, as Dortmund do in Erling Haaland, your few offensive efforts can still be converted into goals and this was demonstrated in the game’s opening ten minutes.

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Matchday 23

Featured Game – RB Leipzig 3-2 Borussia Mönchengladbach

Saturday’s Topspiel served up an absolute cracker with goals and drama galore! There was so much riding on the game for both sides and this is ostensibly what caused the match to go the way it did – Leipzig had such pressure on them to keep up their title challenge with a win at home, especially after seeing Bayern thrash Köln earlier in the day, but for ‘Gladbach the task was simply to try and keep themselves in with a shout of reaching the European spots at the end of the campaign. Arguably, it is Leipzig’s task that appears the more challenging and this may have been the reason for their nervous start to the game and questionable defending for both of their opponents’ goals.

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