Edin Terzic’s side showed newfound steel and grit in their tense 2-1 win against RB LeipzigThey say that history is written by the winners, but it never felt, before this season, as if Borussia Dortmund would be in the position to pick up their pen. Now, it might be different. It felt that way when Nico Schlotterbeck, the crown prince of defensive drama in these parts, saw Timo Werner’s late shot speed past Alexander Meyer, Dortmund’s stand-in goalkeeper, and reacted to clear off the line with a mixture of chest and shoulder, all but sealing the win. Schlotterbeck clenched his fists, celebrating it like a goal.It wasn’t quite Roman Weidenfeller smothering Arjen Robben’s penalty late on when Bayern visited Westfalen...
German football’s newest force ended a historic week by being ‘shaken off like a handful of snow’ by the ‘irritated’ championsUrs Fischer knew. In a season where everything, anything has been possible for Union Berlin and after in a week in which the bar being raised even higher didn’t feel like a pinch, there was still a frontier too far. And this was it.“We had no chance,” said Union’s defender Robin Knoche after a 3-0 defeat at Bayern Munich in Sunday’s late game, a loss that will not ruin the Berliners’ phenomenal season but which could have been so, so much worse without the intervention of Frederik Rønnow, whose string of face-saving saves included one literally with his face, late...
Hertha were motivated and applied themselves well against city rivals Union. The problem was the resultIt was always going to be aesthetics, and so it proved. The importance of only the eighth top-flight derby between Hertha and Union was everywhere you looked – not least in the sold-out stands of the Olympiastadion, such a contrast to the relatively paltry turnout for Wednesday night’s humiliating hammering for Hertha at the hands of Wolfsburg. The problem was that, even at such an early stage of this as an elite-level rivalry, we already knew which way this was going, and so it proved. Hertha’s coach Sandro Schwarz had suggested in Thursday’s pre-match press conference that the result didn’t matter as much as the...
Niko Kovac’s heart may be ‘attached to Hertha’ but his surging Wolfsburg team showed them little mercy in a Bundesliga routWolves are built to thrive in bitter winter, so with the champions still struggling to de-ice the windscreen and get the motor running, who better to assume the role of Bayern for now? In a glacial Olympiastadion in Berlin on Tuesday, Wolfsburg flamed their hosts, Hertha, 5-0 to make it two wins, 11 goals scored and none conceded. They remain seventh but only three points off third place and now with a better goal difference, and defensive record, than any team beyond Bayern.They are imperious. It was Die Wölfe’s sixth league win in a row, and they’ve kept clean sheets...
Out of the bottom three after and winning a local derby, Leverkusen can sign off for the Bundesliga’s break with hopeIf Leverkusen have spent most of the campaign so far hiding their bright light under a bushel, it was shining high in the grey skies last weekend as they steamrollered long-time league-leaders Union Berlin. The highlight of Englische Woche, though? Don’t be fooled. If Sunday was the main course this, a 15-minute hop behind enemy lines on a fresh Wednesday night, was the dessert.That half-hour of second-half heaven against Union, where a goalless first half became a 5-0 virtuoso display, felt like a placebo in the context of the midweek derby at Köln, like a little holiday from reality. It...