Bordon, Rafinha (Brazil) and Farfan are excellent players from South America. Zambrano (like Farfan from Peru) seems to be on his way. Their new coach, Magath, is the former Wolfsburg-coach, one of the best in the league. We tried all we could to defend our goal (and were successful for remarkable 65 minutes) but in the end, powerful Schalke managed to score twice (Asamoah and Farfan).
After 2 defeats in a row and before the 2 matches against Bayern, it was of great importance that we win against Hannover. Actually I considered it the most important match of the season so far because 5 defeats in a row seemed possible – and we would once again have to fear about relegation. But we won. Liberopoulos, who doesn’t have that much influence this season than the year before up to now, was the man of the match with 2 headers. With the first one, he scored the 1:0. After the evening-up for lucky Hannover by Stajner, our Greek attacker prepared the decisive goal by Meier. We were all relieved and now knew we could face Bayern with a lot of self-confidence.
The true reason for this victory is my uncle. The players always stay the night before the matches at a hotel at the Main (the river that crosses Frankfurt). My uncle lives at the Main as well and sometimes goes for a run along the river. Whenever he meets the Eintracht-players, who regularly go for a walk near the hotel in the morning before a match, our team will win. Here you can see the photo-evidence:
At Bayern Munich we nearly surprised the whole nation with an interesting match. Bayern were the clearly better team but missed to score. Meier on the other side scored with our first shot on the goal after 60 minutes. Meier’s statistics are truly impressing. Including the cup-matches, he already scored 5 goals in 13 matches and prepared 5 goals either. His contract ends next summer and it will be very important thing to extend it. Other contracts that end are for example Proell, Spycher and Liberopoulos. Right after the goal, Meier was on his way to the 2:0, running alone towards Butt. The referee decides, it was offside, but he was clearly wrong. Instead of winning 2:0, we lost 1:2 in the end, because Robben (the Dutch attacker went from Real Madrid to Bayern in summer) and van Buyten (2 minutes before the end) scored. It was a match that really made me angry for some days, because we shouldn’t have lost that one.
The “revenge” match 4 days later was embarrassing, we lost the cup-match 0:4, millions of people watched on television in several countries how Eintracht played worse than ever this season. I’m sure you agree with me, I am not going into further details, it’s too painful.
By winning against Bochum 2:1 (goals by Caio - see his free-kick enter on the picture above - and Franz who scored after being responsible for an own-goal before), kept the head up and stayed on position 9, it's one Eintracht's best starts within the last 14 years. The Skibbe era starts not bad - 22:22 goals in 14 matches (6 victories, 4 ties, 4 defeats).
Enjoy Schobberobber’s corner and Tim’s interview with Maik Franz!
Special thanks go to Tim Harris for proofreading!
And I want to thank some of our readers for sending us photos. We are always keen on receiving photos from you, it is nice and gives a great overview about how is the composition of our 1.400 readers.
Josh from Los Angeles
Gordon from Edinburgh (Scotland)
"Crespo" from China
