West Ham and Eintracht Frankfurt have embraced the Europa League this year and Eintracht’s assured performance gave them a deserved win.
Say what you like about Eintracht Frankfurt, but they sure know how to make an entrance. Before the start of their Europa League semi-final first leg against West Ham United, thousands of their supporters marched to The London Stadium, singing as they went. It wasn’t difficult to see how they’d taken over Camp Nou a couple of weeks before. West Ham United have finally started to feel like a club with an identity after several shapeless and often unhappy years after leaving The Boleyn Ground, a decision that got increasingly unpopular as its implications became increasingly clear. But The London Stadium might be starting to feel like home, and this year’s Europa League has been a big part of that.
Semi-finals can be when the fireworks fly. There is a tendency in cup finals for teams to become too fearful of losing, leading to matches becoming underwhelmingly cautious, but semi-finals seem to tap into a different part of the brain, the part that shouts, ‘We go hell for leather, and damn the consequences!’ so loudly that it can’t be ingored. Consider, for example, the recent Champions League semi-final between Manchester City and Real Madrid. How likely would it have been for that to happen in the final? Admittedly, this was a first leg which the coaches might even have considered an exploratory mission before the main event gets underway back in Germany in a couple of weeks. Full-time was half-time this evening.
This one had a strange sense of history about it. European club football is, as we all know, highly stratified, with the usual suspects sitting at the top table, intending to remain there in perpetuity, as though it’s some sort of weird birthright. But European club football used to be less lop-sided than this, and some would argue still is. The Champions League is just one of three semi-final first…
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