Freiburg’s football gods go missing as Champions League dream dissolves

This should have been the day in which Freiburg made all their dreams come true. Sat in fourth place in the Bundesliga, with rivals RB Leipzig having come off a dreadful week of domestic defeat and European disappointment, they were set – with the sun out and their still-spanking-new Europa-Park Stadion full to its near-35,000 capacity, they were ready to celebrate. “It was actually arranged perfectly by the football gods,” wrote Florian Schmieder of Badische Zeitung.

Enter Union Berlin, a club who inspire feelings of great affection off the pitch but on it are brutally realistic. Not that there is anything wrong with that, of course. Urs Fischer has done an incredible job with Union, making them unquestionably the capital’s best team on a relative shoestring. Yet stories of football romance are meant to be beautiful chaos and in a sporting sense, Union thrive on order. As a club, they are the dream of many neutrals. As a team, they are the stuff of many opponents’ worst nightmares.

They were certainly Freiburg’s on Saturday afternoon. The carnival all but turned into a wake as Union were ruthlessly efficient. They had relatively little of the ball but powered by a sensational first-half display from Sheraldo Becker, they couldn’t be stopped. Becker’s teasing cross was thighed on to a post by Maxi Eggestein for Grischa Prömel to tap in the first. An even better delivery from the same player was emphatically headed in by Christopher Trimmel for number two and Becker himself pounced on a Nico Schlotterbeck misjudgment to go solo and smash in from an angle, giving Union a 3-0 half-time lead. They sat in defended in an exemplary fashion and trimmed Freiburg apart on the counter almost at will.

Christian Streich’s side had