When Timo Werner is asked by caring friends on Sunday how his week went, he has a little more to tell than usual On Thursday he sat for the first time in front of a journalistic audience in the training center on Leipzig’s Cottaweg and was already talking about his time as casually as if he was just one gap year returned. It wasn’t that bad in London, and his English had gotten better too.
Incidentally, according to Werner, he comes back as someone who won the Champions League and allegedly set a record in England for the player who had the most goals disallowed by video refereeing. On Saturday, when the week was still not over, Werner was right in the starting XI of RB against 1. FC Köln, the club that is coached by Steffen Baumgart, who has long been a flat cap wearer because of his successful work at FC of the year should have been chosen if this title existed.
Instead, shortly before the game, Leipzig’s all-round wonder Christopher Nkunku received the award for Player of the Year 2022, and in the 15th minute almost everything mentioned came together for the first time: Werner on Nkunku, Nkunku in the goal, video referee like this: nope. Offside. Relief under Baumgart’s cap.
But even if technology doesn’t bring any gifts, one can sometimes hope for what is somewhat disparagingly called the “human factor”. In this case, Cologne keeper Marvin Schwäbe made the return of the flutschfinger perfect in the 36th minute on this summer weekend. After Freiburg’s Mark Flekken had unhappily conceded an actually easy ball the day before, Schwäbe now slipped through a fairly solvable distance ball from Werner. This was also practical for Werner because he didn’t have a single action in the penalty area throughout the game, but was still allowed to score in the 67th minute. Then came André Silva, who appeared somewhat hesitant.
After the lead, Leipzig missed both the maximum and the minimum target
Werner’s 1-0 lead was followed by the strangest and certainly also the most interesting minutes of this eventful and worth seeing game, in which Cologne, as expected, tried to exacerbate situations with all possible crosses from the outside. And in which the Leipzig audience could see the offensive potential in the interaction of Nkunku, Werner and the strong Dani Olmo.
In any case, in the ten minutes after the 1-0 goal, the Swabian, who was previously responsible for the goal, parried extremely well, oh well, at least three bears strong against Nkunku. The 2:0, so Tedesco after the game, would have been the maximum goal in this situation – the minimum goal, not to catch the 1:1 on the counter, which happened through the good Florian Dietz (40th), logically after a cross from Outside.
Disbelieving look: Leipzig’s Dominik Szoboszlai (left) saw the red card just before half-time.
(Photo: Roger Petzsche/Imago)
In injury time of the first half, Dominik Szoboszlai surprisingly and unnecessarily lost some of his nerves. After the game there was broad agreement that it was more of a pushing than a punching movement and that the following red card was certainly a tough decision – but in the end it is also true that Szoboszlai’s arm was on the opponent’s neck and that he wasn’t there belonged.
1:1 instead of 2:0, and then still outnumbered, how do you continue? Tedesco logically brought on Joško Gvardiol, among others, as an uncompromising bouncer at the back of the quite shaky back five. And also because of the second change – it came to Kevin Kampl for the center of the rooms – Leipzig was initially even superior to the field and scored the 2-1 with a textbook attack, goal scorer: the first nicely crossing, then easily turning into the long corner player of the year Nkunku.
But Cologne had the power to make up for the deficit a second time – albeit in a way that Tedesco rightly called “bitter” after the game: No attack situation generated by Cologne’s superiority made it 2-2, but a corner that Gvardiol unluckily scored own goal was spent (72nd).
Josko Gvardiol (right) maneuvered a corner kick into his own goal.
(Photo: Karina Hessland/Imago)
At this point in his weekly report, Timo Werner could say that he would have liked to have stayed on the field a little longer, because Leipzig was no longer able to react to the equalizer – and had already dropped four points after two games. When the word “false start” was thrown at him, Tedesco said that if you look at the points, “two out of a possible six, then of course it’s a false start”. If, on the other hand, he looks at the “how”, in terms of the way he plays, then he has to say: “everything is ok”, with the possible exception of the defense a little.
Steffen Baumgart, on the other hand, said it was “from my point of view a good game, a very good game”. He certainly means the four points that Cologne have already scored after two difficult games at the beginning of this season – but he also means the game as a whole, which should also have given striker Timo Werner an appetite for the Bundesliga.