• Maturing striker stars in redemptive win against Leverkusen• André Silva and Bas Dost benefit from colleague’s fine formJust 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...
Football fairytales eventually hit financial reality, but Atalanta still hope to dance at the Champions League ballIf you exclusively watched Atalanta in the Champions League this season, you might have concluded that this Cinderella story had reached midnight. Thrashed 4-0 by Dinamo Zagreb, and then beaten at home by Shakhtar Donetsk, the debutants are rushing to exit the European ball that they wished so desperately to attend. Their run in the tournament could effectively be ended by Manchester City over the next two matchdays, starting at the Etihad Stadium on Tuesday night.There are no happily-ever-afters for footballing fairytales. Financial realities always come to bear eventually, and Atalanta remain a team representing a town of little more than 100,000 people. Even...
Hoffenheim ending a major run of invincibility underlined how the perception of Bayern has changed under Niko KovacThis Sunday was the Bayern Munich squad’s traditional drop-in to Oktoberfest. It’s an iconic scene with the players and their families, who dress up in traditional Bavarian outfits of lederhosen and toast the moment. The atmosphere is often heady. On one occasion, the story goes, Pep Guardiola spontaneously decided that he and his charges should commandeer a private jet to fly off and watch Juventus take on Roma in a Serie A top-of-the-table clash in Turin.This time, the mood was slightly different. Manuel Neuer “could be happy”, wrote Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Lisa Sonnabend. “He can have a drink on Sunday at the Oktoberfest, because...
What was striking in the Derby d’Italia was how both teams are already reflecting their new managers’ personalitiesAfter four-and-a-half months, the wait was finally over. From the moment Antonio Conte agreed to replace Luciano Spalletti at Inter, anticipation had been building for his first encounter with Juventus: the club with which he made his name as both a player and manager. The club he restored to glory after taking charge there in 2011. The club that has dominated Italian football ever since.Inter approached Conte this spring in the hope he could help them to tear down the juggernaut he built. After consecutive Champions League qualifications under Spalletti, it was time to take another step forward, to compete for the title...
Week six had been marked by kids, born after 2000, but also by two veterans at the other end of the scale“I like the goal, yeah,” Zinedine Zidane said, “but I like controls more, and his control was the hostia.” Which was one, pretty good way of putting it. The hostia is the body of Christ, the holy host, the consecrated bread, and bloody brilliant – a Spanish equivalent of the dog’s dingly-danglies – and Real Madrid’s manager was right. What Rodrygo had just done was special; where he had done it and when he had done it was, too. It was 10.30pm on Wednesday when James Rodríguez’s long, high diagonal reached him way over on the left. His first...