In the large Frankfurt stadium, the women of Eintracht want to take the second step towards the Champions League.
Foto: imago/Peter Hartenfelser
The female soccer players have also been able to enjoy the special aura of the European Cup at a club like Eintracht Frankfurt. It was not for nothing that the club invited its women to their trips to Barcelona and Seville to watch the men’s Europa League triumph a year ago – now they should make their dream of the Champions League come true. The arduous path to the premier class for the Frankfurt women starts with a mini-tournament in the Main metropolis: The Bundesliga third place is the favorite when it comes to 1. FC Slovácko from the Czech Republic this Wednesday in the stadium at Brentanobad.
Also present are Juventus Turin and WFC Okzhetpes from Kazakhstan. If everything goes according to plan, Eintracht and Juve will meet in the final on Saturday. That’s why the large arena in the city forest has already been booked – combined with the hope of generating the first greater attention to women’s football in the new season, before a week later the Bundesliga operation with the opening game SC Freiburg against champions FC Bayern starts.
“It’s a huge honor to be able to play this tournament in this city. In front of fans who will push us,” says Frankfurt captain Tanja Pawollek, who of course knows the target from the boardroom that men and women should be internationally employed until at least Christmas. Only the winner of the mini-tournament makes it into the playoff round, which will not be played out until October due to the World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. The Champions League finalists VfL Wolfsburg, as runners-up, also have to squeeze their way through this autumnal bottleneck in order to get into the group phase. Only 16 teams play for women and not 32 teams like for men.
For the second and third from Germany, England, Spain or France, the qualification for the Champions League is not a sure-fire success: Manchester City have already failed twice at Real Madrid, Eintracht Frankfurt last year at Ajax Amsterdam, by conceding a goal in added time. A bitter experience that coach Niko Arnautis sees as an incentive. “That didn’t knock us down,” assures the 43-year-old: “An extra portion of motivation” was drawn from it.
This definitely applies to his five German national players, who have long since turned their frustration from the completely unsuccessful World Cup mission back into lust. It was well known that Stina Johannes would only play a supporting role as the third goalkeeper, but the four field players Sophia Kleinherne, Sara Doorsoun, Laura Freigang and Nicole Anyomi were surprised when they were told before the tournament started that they would only be second in their positions choice. To this day, there is a lot of talk within the league about the preference given to Wolfsburg in the DFB team.
The Frankfurt women could have complained the loudest about it, because the fact that the winger Anyomi, who was in great form, was not preferred to the weak Jule Brand in any group game was at least as questionable as the fact that the reliable defensive all-rounder Kleinherne didn’t play a minute of the World Cup, although with Carolin Simon and Felicitas Rauch, two regular left-backs, were out. Instead, Chantal Hagel, who had moved to Wolfsburg, gave up an overwhelmed emergency solution in this position. Kleinherne bit back every dig when the 23-year-old wrote on her Instagram profile looking back at the World Cup: “We don’t have to deny that the result was below our expectations. Nevertheless, I was able to experience an incredible amount on the trip, for which I am infinitely grateful.« The best thing, however, is »that looking ahead to the upcoming tasks is by no means difficult.«
The players themselves could classify what they had experienced Down Under, explains Arnautis meaningfully, his German supporters in particular would now be looking forward to the “beautiful” tasks with “their” unity. The coach does not want to speak a syllable about the possible pairing against the Italian runners-up, first of all the homework against the best Czech training club has to be done. That also sounded like a lesson from the German World Cup failure, when the national coach Martina Voss-Tecklenburg often spoke before the group stage against supposed underdogs like Morocco, Colombia and South Korea about a possible round of 16 against Brazil and France, which, as is well known, then happened in Australia never came.
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