A new-look forward line at Eintracht Frankfurt is beginning to bear fruit for manager Adi Hütter after some high-profile departures after last season | Andy Brassell

• Maturing striker stars in redemptive win against Leverkusen
• André Silva and Bas Dost benefit from colleague’s fine form

Just deal with the first half. That may, and arguably should, have been Eintracht Frankfurt’s plan going into Friday night. The last time they’d played Leverkusen, they had begun with hope and ended humiliated. Eintracht’s trip to BayArena was set between the two legs of their Europa League semi-final with Chelsea, the third-from-last Bundesliga game of the season and with the team having the chance of a Champions League place in their own hands.

It was, ultimately, the moment in which it became abundantly clear that Eintracht’s tank had pretty much run dry. After 36 minutes in Leverkusen they were 6-1 down, shell-shocked and bereft. That ended up as the final score as they zombie-marched through the remainder of the game – as an almost equally-stunned home side did as well to an extent – and even though they ended that Sunday afternoon still in fourth place, it felt as if a fat wedge of possibility had been left there. They still managed, improbably, to pull a heroic performance out from somewhere for the second leg with Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, and it was agonisingly close to being enough to get them to the Baku final. They fell to the Blues on penalties in the end, and that used up the last few drips of fuel Adi Hütter and his team had.