At the stadium – Eintracht Frankfurt vs. Cologne FC 1:2

I’m a native Ger­man writer and  an enthu­si­as­tic fan of Ein­tra­cht Frank­furt. When­ever I got the oppor­tu­nity to visit a game in the Com­merzbank Arena, I take this oppor­tu­nity. Last match-day I vis­ited the match against Cologne.

Sta­dium: Com­merzbank Arena ( Ein­tra­cht Frankfurt)

Atten­dance: 45,100

Ticket-Price: Main stand — 23 Euro (32 US-Dollars/ 20 GBP) – reduc­tion for students

Trav­el­ling to Frank­furt was very exhaust­ing because it was snow­ing all the time and the high­way was full of traf­fic jam. Nor­mally it takes one and a half hour to reach Frank­furt from my uni­ver­sity but on this day it took three hours.

Because of this, I took of my seat in the Com­merzbank Arena at least fifth teen min­utes after the match had started. I hoped des­per­ately that my team would indem­nify me for this hor­ri­ble journey.

Frank­furt had to com­pen­sate the injury of Swiss mid­fielder Pirmin Schwe­gler, who was one of the best play­ers in the team this sea­son. Frank­furt was unde­feated since six games.  Cologne must relin­quish national-team striker Lucas Podol­ski, but played a lot bet­ter in the last two games against Dort­mund and Wolfs­burg than in the first half of the season.

In the first half the two teams showed their worst foot­ball, no high­lights. In the sec­ond half cologne intro­duced its new mid­fielder Soran Tosic, who had played for Man­ches­ter United. He pro­vides cologne much more offen­sive pres­sure and even Frank­furt shaped its game more offen­sively than in the first half. In the 59^th minute of the game Maniche scored the goal giv­ing lead for cologne and my state of mind was worse.

Eintracht-coach Michael Skibbe intro­duced the two mid­field­ers Ümit Kork­maz and Caio to increase the pres­sure. After the sub­sti­tu­tions Frank­furt played much bet­ter and was the dom­i­nant team on the field. Defender Chris scored the equaliser in the 76^th minute for Frank­furt after a cor­ner and I cel­e­brated this very exten­sively. The equaliser gave my team the ini­tial spark to go for win­ning the game. Frank­furt got sev­eral chances to score another goal but missed all of them. Cologne was only in the posi­tion to defend the draw.

In the 84^th minute my worst night­mare became true! After a cologne free-kick, Eintracht-defender Marco Russ deflected the ball in his own goal. 1–2 for cologne!! Frank­furt wasn’t able to turn the game after this shock.

This result made me very sad because Ein­tra­cht Frank­furt played bet­ter than cologne – but that’s foot­ball. I watched an unevent­ful first half but a very dra­matic and pow­er­ful sec­ond half. Unfor­tu­nately my team didn’t bring the match to a favourable conclusion.