Adi Hütter had a tough start at Eintracht Frankfurt but his team have now found their feet as Stuttgart discovered on Friday
When the opposition is down, keep your foot on the throat. In the infancy of his tenure but already desperate for a result, Stuttgart’s coach Markus Weinzierl would have hoped for opponents without that type of focus as his team opened the Bundesliga weekend at an anxious Mercedes-Benz Arena on Friday night. Unfortunately, he and they bumped into Eintracht Frankfurt instead.
Few expected this to be much of a season for last term’s DfB Pokal winners after Niko Kovac’s departure for Bayern Munich even if his replacement, Adi Hütter, was coming off a Swiss Super League win with Young Boys – but recent weeks have raised hopes. Still, they had been stretched by a couple of injuries before travelling south, with the experienced defender Marco Russ and midfielder Mijat Gacinovic both staying home in Frankfurt with injuries. It left them down to the bare bones at the back, so Hütter decided the best form of defence was attack, replacing Gacinovic with a striker, Sébastien Haller – putting the Frenchman in the starting lineup with Ante Rebic and Luka Jovic for the first time.
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Stuttgart 0-3 Eintracht Frankfurt, Hertha Berlin 0-3 RB Leipzig, Wolfsburg 0-1 Borussia Dortmund, Schalke 3-1 Hannover 96, FC Augbsburg 2-2 FC Nurnberg, Bayern Munich 1-1 SC Freiburg, Bayer Leverkusen 1-4 Hoffenheim, Mainz 2-1 Werder Bremen, Mönchengladbach 3-0 Fortuna Düsseldorf
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