Hannover 96 were relegated from the Bundesliga despite not playing on Sunday as Eintracht Frankfurt came from behind to beat FSV Mainz 05 2-1 and end their last hope of clinching a playoff place.
Anis Ben-Hatira forced Frankfurt’s winner in the 84th minute when his cross was deflected into the net off the back of Mainz defender Stefan Bell.
The win lifted second-from-bottom Frankfurt to 30 points, one behind Werder Bremen in the relegation playoff place, with Hannover nine points behind Bremen with three games remaining. As Frankfurt and Bremen meet on the last day of the season, every permutation puts the playoff out of Hannover’s reach.
After 14 years in the Bundesliga, it was Hannover’s fifth drop from the top flight after two relegations in both the 1980s and 1970s.
The club had fired Thomas Schaaf as coach in a late bid for survival on April 3 after his run of 10 defeats in 11 games. Successor Daniel Stendel stayed unbeaten in the three games since, but it was too little, too late.
“Our fate was clear for two or three weeks,” Hannover general manager Martin Bader said. “The likelihood that a miracle could happen was at most 1 or 2 percent.”
Mainz defender Daniel Brosinski opened the scoring with a perfect free-kick in the 18th minute — the only highlight in a scrappy first half — 10 minutes before Marco Russ scrambled in the equalizer.
Frankfurt pushed hard after the break, with Ben-Hatira going close and then Loris Karius producing a reflex save to deny Haris Seferovic, before Ben-Hatira finally gave Frankfurt a lifeline and sealed Hannover’s fate.
“We put in an enormous effort and were finally rewarded for once. It would have been disastrous if we’d only taken a point from the game. Now we are all full of hope again that we’ve turned the tide,” Frankfurt chairman Heribert Bruchhagen said.
Earlier, Mahmoud Dahoud scored one goal and set up another as Borussia Moenchengladbach boosted their Champions League hopes with a 3-1 win over TSG 1899 Hoffenheim.
Moenchengladbach moved one point behind Hertha BSC, who occupy the last Champions League qualification spot.
“We have 48 points and are in a wonderful position. Now we have three games to finish it,” said sporting director Max Eberl, whose side bounced back from two straight defeats. “The team showed a great reaction.”
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier