A Good Week in Europe for the Bundesliga

It was a pretty good week for the Bun­desliga in Euro­pean competitions.

Let’s start with the dis­ap­point­ing. Wolfs­burg fol­lowed a 2–0 road loss with a 1–3 loss at the VW to PSG of France. While PSG has been a self-imploding team over the pre­vi­ous two cam­paigns, con­tend­ing with rel­e­ga­tion both sea­sons, this year they have been strong enough to con­tend for the title (cur­rently 2nd) of Ligue Un. Rely­ing on defen­sive orga­ni­za­tion with an aggre­gate lead going into the 2nd leg, the cap­i­tal side were able to hit the Wolves 3 times on the counter as they chased from the get-go. Con­sid­er­ing PSG’s turn of for­tune, Felix Magath’s side’s inabil­ity to advance, espe­cially in light of a miss­ing Grafite and a lack of Euro­pean expe­ri­ence, isn’t dev­as­tat­ing. In fact, their decent run in the com­pe­ti­tion lays the ground work for them as they have an excel­lent chance to return to Europe next year.

Stuttgart crashed out the the UEFA Cup to the cur­rent hold­ers. How­ever, it feels very dis­ap­point­ing. Stuttgart have been revi­tal­ized under Markus Babbel, but his only two losses have come to Zenit St. Peters­burg. Los­ing both legs 2–1, they were in with a shout tonight hav­ing scored a cru­cial road goal, last week. They looked the bet­ter side for the first half when they seemed des­tined to oust Dick Advocaat’s side, but a 41st minute goal from Igor Semshov took the fight out of the Swabi­ans, who relin­quished pos­ses­sion in the sec­ond half. Still, it was a bet­ter show­ing than Bay­ern gave against Zenit last year.

Mean­while Ham­burg moves on to the round of 16 with a 4–0 (1–0 on the night) aggre­gate win over NEC Nijmegen. Bring­ing home a three goal lead to the Nord­bank made this game rather aca­d­e­mic, espe­cially after the 9th minute goal from Olic. But HSV did what they needed to advance and will face Galatasaray in the round of 16. It was espe­cially fit­ting that Mar­tin Jol would con­tinue in this tour­na­ment, in light of the ane­mic per­for­mance by the club that so harshly fired him last year. (note that Jerome Boateng played; whereas, Streit did not)

It looked to be a rather bleak night, at one point, as Werder went down 2–0 in the San Siro to the Ital­ian giants A.C. Milan. After Frings han­dled in the area, wun­derkind Pato gave Milan, what seemed to be, an unsur­mount­able lead against a mis­fir­ing Werder. How­ever, Bre­men has been con­trol­ling games and shoot­ing at will over the past few weeks. While the results haven’t been going their way, it wasn’t deserved and as they con­tin­ued to press, their dom­i­nance in pos­ses­sion and shots (another 27 tonight) finally paid off with a brace by Clau­dio Pizarro. Thomas Schaaf’s men, who have dis­ap­pointed in Europe the past few sea­sons, put on a spe­cial dis­play that should be a “cor­ner turned” for the Green and White. They face St. Eti­enne in the next round.

And lastly, Bay­ern put their Bun­desliga form behind them and thrashed Sport­ing Lis­bon 5–0 in Por­tu­gal on Wednes­day. Franck Ribery put on a spe­cial dis­play that should put the other 15 remain­ing teams on alert as he car­ried the Bavar­i­ans to vic­tory. Luca Toni returned to the lineup and also scored a brace. Munich are all but assured a trip to the quar­ter finals with the return leg set for the Allianz next week. But a per­for­mance like this, much like Werder, could be tal­is­manic for the remain­der of the sea­son as despite their poor form, they are still within four in Europe’s most excit­ing league.

Tagged as: Franck Ribery, Martin Jol