Ob Marco Rose at some point during the past Bundesliga weekend had the thought that his top-class team had missed a rare chance of winning the championship this season due to the ailing Bayern. However, given the developments in the championship battle, he undoubtedly had good reasons for a few thoughts in this direction, and it was obvious that the RB Leipzig coach was thinking quite a bit about football on Sunday during the 2-0 defeat at Bayer Leverkusen .
Again and again Rose stood in a thinking pose in his coaching zone, scratched his beard and yet found no solution against the team of his currently successful colleague Xabi Alonso, who can still hope to win the Europa League. With a style of play that is as clever as it is pragmatic, Leverkusen defeated Leipzig with goals from Adam Hlozek and Nadiem Amiri.
For a good 25 minutes, practically nothing happened in this game, which could be seen as a kind of top game for participation in the upcoming Champions League season. Leverkusen looked dull. And Leipzig is simply unreliable, difficult to calculate and inefficient this spring.
The game flowed smoothly in several phases. Apart from a few moments, not much happened until the somewhat more intense final phase began. The Werkself wasted a great four-on-one counterattack early in the game because Mitchell Bakker ran offside and Dominik Szoboszlai had a good shot in front of the Leverkusen goal, but his shot was not well placed (30′). Not only the Werkself suffered from the absence of Florian Wirtz, but the entire level of the game.
Due to a gastrointestinal infection, the national player was sitting in the stands, from where he was able to celebrate the lead for his team after 40 minutes. Robert Andrich played an excellent pass from deep to Moussa Diaby, who passed the ball to the back of the defence, from where Hlozek scored from eleven meters to make it 1-0. That was a deserved lead in a game in which Leipzig invested far too little for an hour, given the starting position.
In the afternoon, Freiburg had overtaken the Saxons in the table, which meant that RB had slipped out of the Champions League places. But even after the break, the team didn’t find any good solutions against this Leverkusen side stabilized by Alonso, who were simply waiting for a counterattack in the second half.
Again nothing happened for a long time until in the 66th minute, Leverkusen goalkeeper Lukas Hradecky saved against Timo Werner and then saved a dangerous header from Willi Orban. That wasn’t dangerous enough, and Leverkusen’s counterattacks repeatedly stopped Leipzig with fouls. However, Szobozslai was clumsy enough to use this technique in his own penalty area against Jeremie Frimpong. The Hungarian saw the yellow-red card and Nadiem Amiri decided the game with a penalty and the second goal of the match (86th).
