Christopher Nkunku has earned a reputation for being too fast for most Bundesliga defenders. If the Leipzig starts, best of all throws in a little trickery, it gets tricky for most defenders. It’s an experimental arrangement of the meaner kind when Nkunku meets a couple of second division defenders in the DFB Cup, like on Wednesday evening at Hannover 96, who honestly try to get the Frenchman arrested, but in the end are second division defenders.
In any case, Nkunku, 24, only needed two attacks to decide this quarterfinal and order his team into the round of four of the DFB Cup: For a quarter of an hour, the second division team could dream of the next cup coup and a possible trip to the cup final in Berlin – 30 years after 96 surprisingly won the title, as the only second division club to date to have succeeded in this piece of football history.
But then Nkunku competed twice on Wednesday night. He got a through ball from Dani Olmo and coolly put the ball in the goal from eleven meters (17′). Five minutes later, almost in the next attack, Nkunku 96 goalkeeper Ron-Robert Zieler rounded, put the ball a little too far in front, but caught the ball, let defender Marcel Franke slip into the void and completed the second goal from an acute angle (22nd minute). .). Pretty cheeky, but also pretty good. Nkunku’s actions were “the opener for this game,” said RB coach Domenico Tedesco.
Hannover 96 discussed the expulsion of Gerhard Schröder
The rest of the cup evening for Leipzig was well described with a loose end. Since Hannover completely lost courage after the early double strike, RB could easily have shot out a really high result. But there were “only” two more goals from Konrad Laimer (67th) and André Silva (73rd), who made it 4-0. “We were totally dominant. We deservedly reached the semi-finals,” said midfielder Kevin Kampl. RB is still represented in three competitions, in addition to the Bundesliga and the cup also in the Europa League. Tedesco liked it that the players saved a few strengths.
Nkunku still had fun, first juggled the ball on the sidelines with his foot, then sent through hoe passes to his teammates – which did not necessarily make him the most popular Leipzig player in the stadium. The audience whistled at him, but that didn’t bother Nkunku much. While Hannover now have to motivate themselves for the rest of the season in no man’s land in the second division (currently 12th in the table), RB Leipzig is waiting for the semi-final draw on Sunday. And if you look at the remaining field of participants, without FC Bayern or Borussia Dortmund, who have already been eliminated, should be considered the favorite for the title.
The war in the Ukraine was also the dominant accompanying theme before this game. Buses, organized by Hannover 96, were parked in front of the stadium, into which relief supplies brought by the fans were loaded; the destination is the Polish-Ukrainian border. There was the obligatory minute’s silence in the stadium – and then there was the matter of Gerhard Schröder, the former chancellor, who at 96 is anything but an ordinary fan.
Schröder is considered a good acquaintance of 96 boss Martin Kind and was even chairman of the supervisory board of the football company from 2016 to 2019. The parent club is now considering Schröder’s expulsion because of his closeness to Russian President Vladimir Putin, from whom Schröder has not distanced himself since the outbreak of war. The professional society, which Kind heads, is shy. Schröder is “not an issue for us right now,” said Kind, which was taken as a strange comment in the capital of Lower Saxony. After all, the city of Hanover is in the process of taking away the honorary citizenship of the former chancellor and prime minister.
