Union Berlin lost in Bayern blizzard but Bundesliga title race wide open

U rs Fischer knew. In a season where everything, anything has been possible for Union Berlin and after in a week in which the bar being raised even higher didn’t feel like a pinch, there was still a frontier too far. And this was it.

“We had no chance,” said Union’s defender Robin Knoche after a 3-0 defeat at Bayern Munich in Sunday’s late game, a loss that will not ruin the Berliners’ phenomenal season but which could have been so, so much worse without the intervention of Frederik Rønnow, whose string of face-saving saves included one literally with his face, late on from Thomas Müller after the captain was set up by Sadio Mané, making a lively return from injury as a substitute. The introduction of one of the world’s best players from the bench, incidentally, was not even one of the moments which most accentuated the gap between two teams who were statistically level at kick-off.

“According to the table it was a duel on equal footing,” wrote Michael Färber in Berliner Morgenpost, but it quickly became clear that it wasn’t. If Union were hard on themselves, with both Fischer and Knoche bemoaning the team’s concession of goals two and three (“we made it too easy for them,” the coach said with some regret), they probably shouldn’t have been. It had been another extraordinary week for Union on every level, as they dumped Ajax out of the Europa League on an absorbing – not to mention physically and emotionally taxing – night at their Stadion An der Alten Försterei. While they were sweating their way to the last 16 and another significant moment in their history, Bayern had an empty calendar, and room to brood.

Bayern were “goaded,” as Färber said, by last week’s defeat at Borussia Mönchengladbach, a familiar pest for