It was the busy Monday night that everyone could have done without – a creaking Eintracht Frankfurt, Borussia Mönchengladbach’s fans and, ultimately, RB Leipzig. While one Europa League semi-finalist, not quite fresh from a famous win over West Ham in London, struggled to a defeat in Leverkusen with a scratch team the other, far more surprisingly, stumbled an hour to the north-west. If it wasn’t the start to the week Germany’s terrace stalwarts would have ideally wanted, it was far from what Domenico Tedesco would have been hoping for as well.
It’s the price of success, and you don’t make an omelette without cracking a few eggs. Yet the intrinsic fragility of late-season hopes and dreams could not have been clearer on this early summer night in Mönchengladbach. Leipzig still have the best Bundesliga record of any team in 2022, a testament to the fine work of Tedesco, but they have now been pulled back towards the pack by successive Bundesliga defeats, at the worst possible time. Freiburg had the chance to put pressure on their Champions League rivals by winning on Saturday and took advantage of the scheduling.
