German football’s newest force ended a historic week by being ‘shaken off like a handful of snow’ by the ‘irritated’ champions
Urs 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 on from Thomas Müller after the captain was set up by Sadio Mané, making a lively return from injury as a substitute. The introduction of one of the world’s best players from the bench, incidentally, was not even one of the moments which most accentuated the gap between two teams who were statistically level at kick-off.
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