He eliminated Betis when the clock was sending him to the penalty shootout (20 seconds of 120 minutes passed) and he has slipped into the top eight teams in the Europa League convinced that he will be able to repeat an old success, even though he has run into Barça on his way, the worst possible enemy.
So old is that success that it has been more than four decades since Eintracht Frankfurt won the UEFA Cup. It happened in 1980. One of the iconic moments of a club that had the honor of participating in the birth of the Bundesliga in 1963.
In the quiet part of the Bundesliga
It was one of the 16 teams that managed that championship where it now travels through an anonymous zone, occupying the ninth position in the table. Far from the elite that Bayern embodies and also far from Dortmund, the other path of power, Eintracht is also separated from the emerging German football that Leipzig embodies.
It is a club with an enormous tradition (it was founded in 1899), which has one of the most faithful fans in the country, despite the fact that time is consuming its best achievements, summarized in an old German League (1959), five Cups (four of them in the 70s and the last in the 2017-18 season after beating Bayern 1-3 in the final), capable of mobilizing 5,000 fans away from Frankfurt following the ‘Eagles’, as the team is known. equipment.
Trapp, the goalkeeper who conceded all six goals in the comeback against PSG, will now return to the Camp Nou as a pillar of the German team
Far from the elite of the Bundesliga (he is 23 points behind Bayern Munich) and he walks calmly because he looks calmly at the dark zone of the classification because Eintracht is separated by 14 points from Stuttgart, the team that marks the red line of relegation.
Play Eintracht with Kevin Trapp in goal. The goalkeeper who conceded all six Barça goals in Bayern Munich’s famous comeback. He will return on April 14 to the stadium where he received the greatest sporting humiliation he could ever have imagined.
System with three central
So, I was Luis Enrique on the bench, with the trident Messi-Neymar-Suarez piloting a dream forward. “Eintracht plays football very well, we have already seen it, they have just eliminated Betis, who play a good game,” he said. Rafael Yuste, Barça’s sports vice president, to Mónica Marchante in Vamos de Movistar from Nyón, minutes after the draw in which the team de Xavi sees how two of the great candidates (Leipzig and Atalanta) fight each other in the other path of the quarterfinals.
The cruelest way to lose.
Betis eliminated from the Europa League. # LaCasaDelFútbol pic.twitter.com/jsdkwY8u5z– Soccer on Movistar Plus+ (@MovistarFutbol) March 17, 2022
Eintracht is a team used to playing with a 3-5-2, having three central defenders (the Brazilian Tutathe Austrian Hinteregger and the french N’Dicka) protecting Trapp with two long-flying wingers (the German Knauff and the Serbian Kostica poisonous southpaw) to fill the flanks in a team designed for Rafael Borrethe Colombian striker (26 years old), who briefly passed through Villarreal without leaving any trace (17 games, 2 goals) ends all the offensive production generated by the Austrian’s plan Oliver Glasnerthe technician who succeeded this past summer to Adi Hütterwho left for Borussia Mönchengladbach.
“In the 119th minute I thought maybe Kevin Trapp had the best idea in preparing for penalties. What happened then was crazy.”
Oliver Glasner, tecnico del Eintracht
Eintracht survived in an agonizing way when in the last breath of extra time they broke Betis who were already disputing the penalty shootout thanks to Borja Iglesias’ goal. And the Andalusian hope crumbled in the cruelest way when in the last action of extra time a lateral free kick was launched from the left side of the German attack.
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A distant foul that silenced Betis because Rui Silva, his goalkeeper, came out in a crazy way and without any control, allowing Guido Rodríguez’s strange shot at his own door. “In the 119th minute I thought maybe Kevin Trapp had the best idea in preparing for penalties. What happened then was crazy,” Glasner recalled.
“When we scored that last-minute goal it seemed like the whole stadium was going to run onto the pitch,” added the Eintracht coach. And that goal will lead them to face Barça, first at home; then at the Camp Nou. The stadium that Trapp would not want to visit.