Frankfurt on Fire

Not the way to light a fire under some­ones behind

Frankfurt’s “Sabo­teurs”

 
Ein­tra­cht Frank­furt did not exactly bring Fire­works to the game in Karl­sruhe this past week­end, at least not on the field. There were plenty of Fire­works in the vis­i­tors sec­tion of the Wild­park Sta­dion from the Frank­furt Fans how­ever and the match was almost called off by Ref­eree Michael Weiner. This after Frank­furt was fined the week before due to the behav­ior of their fans at a match in Köln. Now the Club is again fac­ing a heavy fine from the DFB and Ein­tra­cht Boss Herib­ert Bruch­ha­gen is steamed and call­ing the Fans “Saboteure”.

 
At the Clubs board meet­ing on Tues­day those respon­si­ble were the first thing on the agenda accord­ing to Bruch­ha­gen. Small won­der as the pre­vi­ous fine for the Cologne match inci­dents was 5000 Euros and the inci­dent in Karl­sruhe should be quite a bit more up to about 60000 Euros. Some of the fire­works lit in the vis­i­tors sec­tion landed in the vicin­ity of KSC Keeper Markus Miller. Ref­eree Michael Weiner then took the play­ers off the pitch and started the sec­ond half only after a 5 minute delay.
“Every Euro we have to spend for this is aggra­vat­ing” said Bruch­ha­gen in antic­i­pa­tion of the com­ing fine and added: “We are not going to tol­er­ate this sort of thing. We will prob­a­bly pay a severe price but this needs to stop. We can’t allow our­selves to let cer­tain par­ties dic­tate their actions to us”.

 
Ein­tra­cht adds new mea­sures immediately

Ein­tra­cht Board Mem­ber Klaus Lötzbeier, respon­si­ble for Fan Mat­ters with the Club, sum­ma­rized it like this: “Ein­tra­cht Frank­furt will try any means nec­es­sary to remove the crim­i­nal ele­ments amongst our Fans and we also appeal to all of our Sup­port­ers that honor the Club and love the game to help us with this.” Accord­ing to Lötzbeier this could mean restric­tions on every fan as that is the only way to find the “irre­spon­si­ble peo­ple that hide behind the peace­ful sup­port­ers and elim­i­nate them.”

Of course the Ein­tra­cht Frank­furt Inter­net forums are see­ing some heavy use as the dif­fer­ent sup­port­ers are going at each other over right or wrong, good or bad, and of course try­ing to fig­ure out the rea­sons why this hap­pened and how to pre­vent it.

So what is your opin­ion is this part of the game and sup­posed to help the team or is this more about Fan groups try­ing to make a name and rep­u­ta­tion for themselves?