Through the power of habit, RB Leipzig has made up ground in the fight for the Champions League places – and multiplied Hertha BSC’s relegation concerns. On Saturday, the Leipzig team won, as they had on their six previous visits to Hertha in the Olympic Stadium – and pushed past SC Freiburg 1-0 to fourth place in the table.
The Berliners quarreled over the goal for the 0:1 deficit from the 40th minute. It was only recognized after a multilateral conference lasting a good two minutes – and was officially attributed to Amadou Haidara. In particular, coach Sandro Schwarz protested violently. The outside microphones caught Schwarz repeatedly and emotionally calling one of the participants “completely overwhelmed” to the fourth official. But there was no reasonable doubt as to the legality of the hit.
He fell after a corner kick that Dominik Szoboszlai, with plenty of paprika powder from his Hungarian homeland, kicked into the six-yard box. It’s beyond human imagination that Schwarz thought his own goalie, Denmark’s Oliver Christensen, was completely overwhelmed, but it wouldn’t have been a bad fit. His position was suboptimal, he jumped up too late and only managed to harass the Leipzig defender Mohamed Simakan, who caught the ball with his head and steered it towards the goal.
Christensen obviously managed to swipe the ball back onto the field on the line – but Haidara pushed it into the net from a few centimeters away. The VAR examination showed that Haidara had not been offside either. And that meant that Hertha was deprived of the fruits of self-sacrificing work.
After the game – instead of Schwarz – referee Aytekin criticized the Hertha goalkeeper in the mixed zone: “It was poorly defended.” He saw “immediately” that it wasn’t a foul, Simakan stood in front of Christensen, so he couldn’t commit a foul. The VAR’s review took a long time because three possible offenses were examined: foul, handball and offside. Everything was decided negatively. Aytekin received encouragement from Hertha’s oldie Kevin Prince Boateng. Aytekin didn’t whistle everything correctly, but was right with the goal. “Great!”, Aytekin answered, “that’s how character players are!”
The game in Berlin initially showed some parallels to the Leipzig Cup duel on Wednesday against Dortmund. Leipzig unpacked the trumpets that had intimidated Dortmund and blew the attack. But: You forgot to pull off the silencers. Forsberg served Timo Werner, who made a mistake in the penalty area (4th minute), a few seconds later Forsberg made it himself from 17 meters. Christensen seemed quite insecure: He was lucky that the ball bounced off his chest and out of the goal.
Hertha cools down the game, but there are hardly any chances against Leipzig
As a result, however, Hertha did something that Dortmund had failed to do on Wednesday. Without creating compelling chances, they cooled down the temperature of the game by defending deep, tight and clever, without completely forgoing excursions into the opposing half. The recipe worked. Until the goal was scored, Hertha basically only had one dangerous situation to survive: when the video referee, after looking at still images and video images, decided to declare an attack by Hertha defender Marc-Oliver Kempf on Benjamin Henrichs to be acceptable.
After the break, Hertha tried to increase the pressure. But that didn’t lead to compelling scoring chances, so after a good 60 minutes it was time for the coach. Black brought in Marco Richter, Suat Serdar and Jessic Ngankam for Boateng, Cigerci and Kenny to liven up the attack; his friend and colleague Marco Rose responded by bringing in Portuguese André Silva and Dani Olmo to make better use of the expanding spaces. A passionate fight developed, which Leipzig knew how to conduct in a more structured way and also with greater individual class.
But: Here as well as there, the defensive lines withstood the attack attempts of their respective opponents. It wasn’t until the closing stages that there were more chances. First by Berlin’s Lucas Tousart – but his shot from a tight angle was parried by Janis Blaswich with a good foot defense in the style of a handball goalkeeper. On the other side, Szoboszlai initiated a counterattack which he completed himself: Christensen parried his shot; Klostermann only hit the side netting in the margin. The game remained without further hits that could have challenged the power of habit.