Kevin Trapp, the captain's armband on his left arm, had his hands on his hips. The Eintracht goalkeeper's gaze, anger written on his face, was directed to the left into the distance. To his left in the Darmstadt stadium at the Böllenfalltor stood tall Sasa Kalajdzic, his hands buried deep in his anorak pockets. The Frankfurt striker, who looked deeply sad, also shied away from looking directly at the Eintracht fan block in front of him at that moment. The man next to him in the final line-up, Donny van de Beek, also looked with his distressed expression as he said goodbye to his own supporters, as if the Dutchman had committed something wrong.
Christoph Klarer's equalizer for the “Lilien” to make it 2-2 in the fifth minute of stoppage time turned supposed winners in the Hessenderby into perceived losers on the Frankfurt side in a matter of seconds. In the press conference, a young man asked Dino Toppmöller whether his team had lost the game due to individual mistakes. “We didn’t lose the game,” the Eintracht coach replied, adding meaningfully: “Even if it might feel that way to some people.”
Shortly after Toppmöller sat down on the podium in the press conference room, he looked at his watch on his right wrist and quickly typed something. A few seconds later, his objective and balanced statement about the game followed, which essentially had this message: “We have to take a look at ourselves because we were on the right track, but we didn't do it well after the 60th minute .”
Eintracht Frankfurt is not yet a top team
In the duel with the number one relegation candidate, the sixth-place team from Frankfurt showed two faces, which is why the bottom line was that they were not yet a top team. After the goals from Niels Nkounkou and Ansgar Knauff for a 2-0 lead (33rd and 51st minutes), such a team could no longer have been deterred from success. But the 1:2 (62nd) by SVD newcomer Julian Justvan suddenly stopped the energy of the Frankfurt team, which they had previously demonstrated in an exemplary manner on the pitch. A team that was aggressive and dominated the encounter became a team that appeared far too passive and, despite its good preparatory work, suddenly subordinated itself to the attacking opponent. The Frankfurt team had little to counter the sudden power football of the “Liliens” due to their massive loss of intensity.
Eintracht has “stopped playing football. We have completely lost access. You must never give that away. We're fed up, I have no idea why,” Kalajdzic complained on television. The Viennese had set a good example for a long time: he ran more than eleven kilometers and won more than half of his ten duels. He also unintentionally made it 2-0 with a bad shot.
#Eintracht #Frankfurt #Bitter #realization #derby #Darmstadt
