Sunday October 24th 2021
Union negligently gives away victory
VfB fights back after 35 seconds red
1. FC Union Berlin is one of the best-form teams in the Bundesliga. At VfB Stuttgart everything looks like the fourth win in a row – until stoppage time. The hosts have long since looked flat, also because of a strange lightning dismissal, and then strike.
VfB Stuttgart won one point against Union Berlin while being outnumbered, thus stopping the iron’s streak of victories in the Bundesliga. Wahid Faghir (90. + 3) managed to equalize the Swabians 1: 1 (0: 1) against Berlin, after Atakan Karazor had seen the yellow card twice within 35 seconds (57.).
In the first half, Taiwo Awoniyi (31st) gave Berliners the lead with his seventh goal of the season, most recently against VfL Wolfsburg (2-0), at Mainz 05 (2-1) and against Arminia Bielefeld (1-0) had won. This means that Union missed out on four Bundesliga wins in a row for the first time in club history.
For the Stuttgart coach Pellegrino Matarazzo it was the fourth game in a row without a defeat. With ten points, the Swabians are still stuck in the danger zone. While VfB is hoping for a sense of achievement in the second round of the DFB Cup against 1. FC Köln on Wednesday, Union wants to return to winning ways at third division Waldhof Mannheim.
Kruse-Ersatz hangs up for the lead
Three days after the eventful away trip to Feyenoord Rotterdam (1: 3) in the Conference League, when a Union delegation with club president Dirk Zingler was attacked by hooligans in a bar and 59 Union supporters were later arrested, it went Go ahead in Stuttgart.
For much of the first half, the 32,595 fans in the arena saw almost no highlights. Instead, the VfB supporters kept themselves warm with loud chants. It took half an hour until the mood suffered a bitter damper: Sheraldo Becker, who replaced striker Max Kruse and was back in the starting eleven for the first time in nine months, served strike partner Awoniyi ideally on the edge of the penalty area, who hit with a direct shot into the far corner.
The goal was good for the game, the encounter picked up speed. But VfB captain Wataru Endo (33rd) and Marc Oliver Kempf (34th) missed the direct answer. On the other hand, Awoniyi had the chance of the double (38th) after the preparatory work of the strong Genki Haraguchi. After changing sides, Stuttgart took control first, but Karazor’s unnecessary dismissal made the task difficult. After that, Stuttgart looked physically battered as the game progressed, but then hit back at the last minute.