Sunday, November 21, 2010

Bundesliga Week 13 Round Up: Allagui magic

If and when you get round to checking out the goals for this weekend's Bundesliga action, you should start with Borussia Monchengladbach v Mainz. 'Gladbach's first and second were by Marco Reus. His first was the best, running on to a fast travelling ball and shooting first time passed the 'keeper.

Unfortunately for him and typically for 'Gladbach, he and his team mates were unable to keep a clean sheet. Andre Schurrle has already equalised when Reus scored his second. After that it was the Sami Allagui Show with his glamorous assistant Christian Fuchs. His cross on the 76th minute provided Allagui with the equalising goal. Then, in the 90th minute, Fuchs played a long ball through to the Tunisian who lobbed the onrushing keeper, ran onto his own ball and headed it casually into the net. Class.

Mainz win their first match in four games and retain their second place by virtue of Bayer Leverkusen's draw with Bayern Munich. Mario Gomez was on the end of some excellent build up play. Leverkusen played well with Sidney Sam the stand out player. He won a penalty on the stroke of half time which Arturo Vidal converted.

Borussia Dortmund stay on top thanks to a hard fought win at Freiburg. The home side openned the scoring thanks to a defensive mix up which lead to an own goal by Mats Hummels which left the player and coach Jurgen Klopp claiming a foul on 'keeper Roman Weidenfeller. Given Freiburg's penchant for the effective counter attack, a win for BVB seemed unlikely. However, eventually they persevered thanks to the improving Robert Lewandowski. The winner came from an own goal by Mensur Mujdza but Freiburg were unlucky as had the Bosnian left the cross it would have come to an offside player.

The game was also notable for an incomprehensible miss in front of an open goal by Dortmund's Jakub Blaszczykowski which is already turning into a Youtube classic.

In fourth place are Hannover who came back from 2-1 down against Hamburg. Mike Hanke scored in the 90th minute to send Mirko Slomka into rapture and Armin Veh to the dog house.

Elsewhere. Hoffenheim reacted well to my recent post about them with a 4-0 thrashing of Eintracht Frankfurt. Kaiserslautern eased away from the bottom three with a fantastic 3-1 win at Nurnberg. Koln's Lukas Podolski took advantage of a highly dubious penalty to score the only goal in a 1-0 win at Stuttgart . Neither FC St Pauli or Wolfsburg felt in the entertaining mood and played out a fairly drab 1-1 draw.

Finally, it was a dark day for Werder Bremen, beaten as they were 4-0 by a resurgent Schalke. While the German media has been on the one hand celebrating Raul's hattrick, they are also stroking their collective chins and pondering the fate of Bremen coach Thomas Schaaf. The club are standing by their man who has been in charge at the Weserstadion for eleven years. However, his team have conceded 10 gaols in the last three games and by Schaaf's own admission are not responding to his strategies in training.

Breman go to to White Hart Lane on Wednesday to meet Spurs in the Champions League. Bundesliga watchers will be looking to see if Schaaf's players give him some sort of positive response.

That's it. Results and tables here.

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