Frankfurt freeze as ‘lame ducks’ threaten to derail top-four charge | Andy Brassell

Adi Hütter’s impending exit is not helping the surprise contenders as they try to seal a first Champions League finish

If there’s one thing more difficult than keeping a stiff upper lip in the case of things going wrong, it is doing so with the addition of often well-intentioned but deeply unhelpful onlookers asking you if you realise that things are going wrong. Adi Hütter experienced this sensation in his Thursday press conference, as members of the media addressed the shrunken gap between his Eintracht Frankfurt team’s fourth place and the under-achieving but chasing Borussia Dortmund in fifth. “We noticed,” Hütter said tersely. “It’s up to us to do our homework.”

The Austrian coach will need to use the coming fallow weekend, which he plans to give his players off, to work on that poker face. Despite defeat at Bayer Leverkusen – and Dortmund’s 2-0 win at Wolfsburg, which closed the gap to a single point – Eintracht still have the chance of a maiden Champions League qualification in their own hands as it stands, with three palatable remaining fixtures against Mainz, already-relegated Schalke and Freiburg. Yet with nerves jangling a visit to Bay-Arena, where they had lost their last seven visits, was the last thing they needed right now. That sequence rarely looked like being broken on Saturday even if it took Leverkusen until the final quarter to break the game open.

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from Football | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/apr/26/frankfurt-freeze-as-lame-ducks-threaten-to-derail-top-four-charge-bundesliga-football