Young Germany | Your career, education and lifestyle guide

It’s all gone wrong for Frankfurt

bl33eintrachtdaumFor my money, the biggest disappointment is Eintracht Frankfurt. You name it, they’ve done it wrong, and so they deserve what is looking likely to be the fourth relegation in club history. I mean, just look at them: the worst second leg to a season ever and a disastrous attempt at something approaching football against Cologne this weekend – which, needless to say, ended with them losing 0:2.

Football coaches madness, part 2

bundesliga-magathIf you read last week, you’ll remember me dedicating the entire text to the absolute lunacy that has swept through the Bundesliga in the last few weeks, with boards of directors running around like headless chickens and firing coaches left, right and centre.

Well, the bad news is that these chickens are still headless. Bayern München, for example, lost its Champions League round-of-16 decider against Inter Milan and ended up in stormy waters, desperately looking for somewhere to drop anchor and get back to an even keel: to do this, however, they’ll need to offload some ballast in the form of Louis van Gaal, but he just doesn’t want to walk the plank – and, try as they might, the Bavarian boatswains can’t find a replacement first mate. For the moment, he has been saved from going overboard by Franck Ribéry, who shot a winning goal against Freiburg which has at least kept Bayern on course for the Champions League next season. The map who’ll be leading the good ship München through this, however, is likely to be Leverkusen’s Jupp Heynckes.

Directionless directors: a chronic Bundesliga problem

collagebl26vorstaendeIt’s been a dramatic few days, and as I write, a whole locker-room full of coaches is facing the sack, jockeying to try and find other teams or biting their nails about their first ever trip to the dole office. In fact, the kind of frenetic behind-the-scenes wrangling that’s been going on in the last couple of weeks is something of a novelty for most Bundesliga fans: Van Gaal, Magath, Veh, Skibbe, Littbarski, Dutt, Tuchel, Heynckes – 8 out of the 18 club trainers in Germany’s top football league are making more headlines than the teams they coach.

In search of the fascination of a 0:0

This time Bundesliga Blog’s showing you some (low-budget) videos. On Saturday, Oliver and Johannes went to Commerzbank Arena Frankfurt, watching the southwest derby between Eintracht Frankfurt (red shirts with black stripes) and 1. FC Kaiserslautern (white shirts). The fight against relegation drew a 49,400 crowd and the atmosphere created by the fans was top-class (Video #1).

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Unfortunately, both teams played a pretty poor match with nearly no chances. The best one was missed horribly by Kaiserslautern striker Srdjan Lakic in minute 89 (Video #2).

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Eating out at the…Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof?

Who'd have thought?  The best Asian food I've had in Germany was at the Frankfurt train station.  Photo (cc) Resident on Earth

Who'd have thought? The best Asian food I've had in Germany was at the Frankfurt train station. Photo (cc) Resident on Earth

You may laugh, but I have to say that some of the yummiest Asian food I’ve had in Germany was at none other than the Frankfurt Hauptbanhof (that is, the main train station, for the English-speaking folks). For those of you traveling through the station, I’d highly recommend trackside dining at the Asia Gourmet. It’s clear over on the side, by tracks 22 and 23.

Last Friday afternoon I took the train into Frankfurt for an afternoon of shopping, and my first stop was lunch at this place. It’s my Frankfurt ritual.

It’s a young man’s game; both in Dortmund, and in goal

232993902creditRight, let’s get this out of the way straight away: my team, Eintracht Frankfurt, lost this weekend, going down 0:2 to VfB Stuttgart. It was their fourth defeat at home in a row and has helped them to an astonishing new record in terms of losing: it’s the seventh game they’ve played without scoring a goal! And as if this weren’t shameful enough, they were up against a Stuttgart team which spent 75 minutes of the game one man down after their captain, Matthieu Delpierre, got a red card for smacking Frankfurt defender Maik Franz. Eintracht put in 30 shots during the game; Theofanis Gekas, top goal scorer of the first half of the season, hit the inside of the post in the 56th minute, and apart from that, Stuttgart’s 22-year-old goalie Sven Ulreich did a tremendous job. Stuttgart coach Bruno Labbadia had put him on the bench last week against Benfica Lissabon, but after the 34-year-old Marc Ziegler injured himself, Ulreich was suddenly flavour of the month again. Frankfurt, too, had a replacement goalie due to injury, but the 22-year-old Ralf Fährmann standing in for Nikolov made a bit of a hash out of the two shots which sent Stuttgart ahead.

Relegation, or: a nice way to pass the time

littbarski_paI like Pierre Littbarski. First he was one of the country’s most elegant dribblers in midfield, contributing decisively to the World Cup success of 1990. Then he was a coach, with a distinct lack of vanity and an ability to stay focussed and unemotional. This weekend, however, I did find myself wondering about our “Litti”, who has taken over from the luckless Steve McClaren as coach at Wolfsburg. I mean, I know the guy is pretty relaxed, and I know he’s spent the last seven years playing and coaching in Japan, known as it is for its attachment to Buddhist Zen philosophy, but calling your new job “a nice little hobby” in front of television cameras is not really on – especially when your entire team has spent much of this season playing as if their Bundesliga exploits were, for them too, little more than a nice way to pass the time of day, not their primary means of putting food on the table. In fact, they’ve played so poorly that only their goal difference is saving them from the relegation spot; nevertheless, they still lost 1:2 to SC Freiburg this weekend.