🇩🇪 History made as the bottom of the Bundesliga goes barmy | OneFootball

A weekend that kicked off with the latest winning goal in Bundesliga history ended with the season’s second most comprehensive win to keep the title race alive. But is it any surprise that it is the former that has stolen our interest?

Schalke seemed dead and buried at the halfway stage of the season, sat bottom with just nine points from 17 games, seven points from safety. They had scored just 14 goals — including just four in eight away games — and had conceded 41.

They seemed dead and buried again a little over a week ago.

A mid-season renaissance included a run of four consecutive clean sheets and eight games without defeat but it was not enough to at any point drag them out of the bottom three, where they’ve been stuck since early October, and a run of three defeats in four games heading into April’s final weekend meant things looked grim.

A daunting schedule, with trips to Bayern Munich and RB Leipzig to come, meant the writing was as good as on the wall as they went behind at home against Werder Bremen. But they rallied, spectacularly, to win. The dream lived on.

And the dream was carried into Friday’s trip to Mainz, where they seemed dead and buried again.

Having led twice at the MEWA Arena, Schalke went into injury time with the scores level, with those games in Munich and Leipzig looming over the Royal Blue head on the Bundesliga chopping block.

Sometimes all it takes is a moment of madness to define a season.

With the ball high in the air and safely arriving in the arms of Mainz goalkeeper Robin Zentner, Anthony Caci felt a tug on his shirt and responded by grabbing Marius Bülter’s jersey.

And he held on just a second too long.

Bülter went down, a VAR review led to a penalty, the Schalke top scorer stepped up to convert the penalty he had earned to score his second of the night and 11th league goal of the season. No other Schalke player has more than four.

The goal, scored after 101 minutes and 13 seconds, was the latest in Bundesliga history. And Schalke, for the first time since October, had escaped the bottom two and the relegation play-off spot as things stood.

Wins for bottom-placed Hertha (over Stuttgart) and Borussia Mönchengladbach (over Bochum) ensured that remained the case as the rest of the league played over the weekend.

That win for Hertha kept their own slim survival dreams alive, with Bochum still to visit the Olympiastadion as the season reaches a thrilling final few weeks.

With the title race heading to the wire and the race for European spots as fierce as it ever is, there is plenty going on in Germany, but don’t sleep on the relegation zone and what could be one of the greatest escapes the country has ever seen.