For the first time this season, FC Augsburg was able to sell the entire permitted contingent of 12,500 tickets, and that was not due to its own attractiveness, but to the charisma of the opponent.
In the parking lots around the arena, it was possible to observe how fans in Mönchengladbach jerseys were peeling from vehicles with Munich license plates.
In the weeks before that, against Hoffenheim and Leverkusen, the games felt like they were in the ghost days.
Borussia vom Niederrhein has not lost any of its effect, but Augsburg once again proved to be a bad place, as it did on matchday 25, 2020/21, when the Gladbachers managed to lose the sixth competitive game in a row: a 1: 3 against a difficult one ailing FC Augsburg, who was amazed at how he managed to win such a clear victory despite being inferior in all statistical categories.
The game from back then - with Heiko Herrlich for FCA and Marco Rose at Mönchengladbach on the sidelines - came up with memories on Saturday.
Augsburg, now under the direction of Markus Weinzierl and with one goal from four games, the weakest offensive team in the league, managed to overtake the Gladbachers with a 1-0 in the table.
"If we win 1-0 every time with such a possession ratio, I'm satisfied," said Weinzierl.
The rate was 29 percent in a home game.
Six percent less than the 3: 1 half a year earlier.
"We play and play and play and don't get into the sixteen"
The Gladbachers did not expect that they would fail another game in the well-known way in Augsburg. "We scored three goals against Bielefeld," said the new coach Adi Hütter and believed that the weakness of the first three rounds had apparently been overcome since the fourth. But then his creative head Lars Stindl had to determine: “We play and play and play and don't get into the penalty area.” It only succeeded convincingly once, in the first half, when Alassane Plea finished in the Augsburg goal, but from an offside position. Stindl thought that "at least one point should have been taken", but that was done in the 80th minute when Nico Elvedi misjudged a long Augsburg ball and Florian Niederlechner, the best and only goalscorer of the FCA this season, the winning goal scored.
In the table and because his two closest opponents are Dortmund and Wolfsburg, Mönchengladbach is now involved in the relegation battle, but it does not feel that way at this early stage of the season. Hütter says: “I'm not someone who complains”, but he wants to have referred to the personnel situation, which forces him to forego “people who were regular and top players”. The “Scally, Beyer and Netz” deployed in an emergency are developing well. I can't blame the team either, I liked the second half, the last pass didn't go well. We'll analyze well and train well. ”After three defeats, Hütter“ doesn't want to believe ”in an away complex. For him that's just statistics. Yet.