Leipzig’s leader showed why he outscored Nagelsmann at coaching school and hinted at a brighter future for clubJulian Nagelsmann has missed this kind of competition and so, in recent months, has the Bundesliga. This felt just like a Saturday night Top-Spiel should, a meeting of minds, of wills, of guts. RB Leipzig have not shone this season like the upstarts they have been since promotion in 2016 – they have been “playing below their potential … it’s no secret”. as Thomas Müller put it at full-time – but they came to Bayern Munich with what a lot of teams leave at home. Hunger and bravery.On a weekend when Borussia Dortmund underlined that their nominal title challenge is barely even that,...
Furious fans interrupted training after the cup defeat to Union Berlin in midweek and the pressure intensified on Sunday“We have to make sure,” said Hertha Berlin head coach, Tayfun Korkut, “that we put this week behind us and focus on the coming games.” A mere 109 seconds into Sunday’s game against Bayern Munich Corentin Tolisso had the ball in the Hertha net and was called for a marginal offside, and even before the midfielder eventually headed the opener it never felt like the home side were doing anything other than trying to contain the deluge in a paper cup, as Neil Finn might have said – but the coach meant more than just that. Continue reading...
The Switzerland goalkeeper saved two penalties but Borussia Mönchengladbach still lost out to old rivals Bayer LeverkusenHe should have been a hero for a second straight week, but that’s just not how things are working out for Borussia Mönchengladbach right now. Yann Sommer had already flexed his considerable goalkeeping muscles last week, keeping Bayern Munich at bay to help bring home a famous win. This week, the Switzerland star perhaps even bettered himself.In Saturday’s late game with Bayer Leverkusen, a perennial rival for the Champions League places in recent years, Sommer saved not one but two penalties in the second half, and they were both great stops, first plunging to his right to deny Patrik Schick and then later to...
The French forward’s remarkable return to form at 33 is one of the stories of this Bundesliga seasonIt was an evening of not one ending, but two, in Lower Saxony. It took two nods of Anthony Modeste’s head; the first, of the gentlest kind, to score one of the easiest goals of his curious career and end a mini-drought, the second a more forceful show of aerial power to provide an 89th-minute winner and send Köln’s travelling supporters into ecstasy. “My strength is my heading, not my right or my left foot as you saw in that move,” he laughed afterwards with some self-deprecation, having missed an arguably better chance 10 minutes before.The look of deflation on the face of...
New RB Leipzig manager showed his ability to muster unity and his way of absorbing what a set of players need“We need the ball and we need to control the game,” said Domenico Tedesco, summing up his plans at RB Leipzig after a first game, and a first win. If the phrase was fairly anodyne in terms of a new coach setting out his ambitions for a club that wants to continue climbing, it pricked up the ears. This was not from what many thought was the Tedesco playbook.There was a circularity, if not an inevitability, about the 36-year-old pitching up here. Not just because of his fitting the youthful outlook of the club, and not just because he was...