Three things we learnt from the Bundesliga afternoon kick-offs | OneFootball

After a below-par mid-week for Bundesliga teams, the league returned for matchday 29, with everything still left to play for.

Bayer Leverkusen drew with Union Berlin, Freiburg, Augsburg and St.Pauli, all of whom needed late goals to beat Borussia Mönchengladbach, Bochum and Holstein Kiel. Finally, Hoffenheim also overcame Mainz 2-0.

Here is what we learnt:

Bayer Leverkusen are lacking energy:

The warning signs were there last week. Leverkusen struggled against a relegation-fighting Heidenheim and needed a late goal to give themselves hope, but this week was one week too much. Despite completely dominating Union, the visitors ‘park the bus’ defending worked perfectly, and Leverkusen could not find a way to break them down, even after Florian Wirtz returned from the bench.

This Leverkusen side is tired, that is increasingly obvious. Part of this is most likely down to head coach Xabi Alonso’s lack of rotation at times, but it is also because this iteration of the team has run its course, some of the players are not good enough, while there is a lack of quality depth behind their best players. The outside noise surrounding the futures of Alonso and Wirtz has not helped.

On their day, Leverkusen are the best team in the league; however, this season, that day has rarely arrived when it mattered.

In the summer, they will have to work on this massively and evolve into Leverkusen 3.0 under Alonso.

(Note: If you are reading this after the possibility that Dortmund beat Bayern, well, forget everything I just said. The gap has been cut to five points, and the Bundesliga title race is well and truly alive, somehow.)

The fight for Europe is wide open:

Six points separate third and eighth, which means Augsburg still have a chance of qualifying for the Champions League this season (???), We also don’t forget that Dortmund and Stuttgart also have a chance, but play later.  Late goals from the Bavarians against Bochum as well as Freiburg’s winner against Gladbach shook up the status quo, if there ever was one.

You would be deluded or an idiot to predict which teams could actually finish in the European places:

3. Leipzig, 4. Frankfurt, 5. Mainz, 6. Gladbach

The positive takeaway from this is that even if the title race is slipping away from in front of us, it is highly likely that the fight for who makes it into Europe will go down to the final day.

Relegation fighting teams receive a punch to the gut:

Every late goal is a double-edged sword this weekend. Both Kiel and Bochum were on the receiving end of a late winner. They both find themselves 11 and nine points from safety, while Bochum are only two points off of the relegation playoff place.

After several weeks of it looking like Bochum could turn themselves around, they have struggled in recent weeks (their form remains objectively funny with their last two wins against Dortmund and Bayern, I’m not joking, look it up), it now looks likely that they could be condemned to a return to the 2.Bundesliga.

Kiel, on the other hand, apart from a brief moment, has always looked like they were set to go straight back down.

While St.Pauli have given themselves a comfortable cushion to the relegation places and give us hope of the Hamburg derby next season in the Bundesliga, unless HSV, well, HSV…

GGFN | Jack Meenan