Werder Bremen twice squandered a lead to draw 2-2 at SC Freiburg on Sunday, where two goals from evergreen Peruvian Claudio Pizarro were enough to lift them into fifth place in the Bundesliga.
The 33-year-old took his league tally to 15 goals after firing Werder into a 29th-minute lead and restoring their one-goal cushion two minutes into the second half, after Freiburg’s Cedric Makiadi had grabbed a 32nd-minute equalizer.
Werder could have extended their lead in the 53rd minute, but Markus Rosenberg’s shot rattled the post and Jonathan Schmid leveled again for the hosts in the 71st minute, beating goalkeeper Tim Wiese from a tight angle, with the ball rolling off the post into the goal.
Photo: EPA
Werder, who have drawn their last three games since the Bundesliga restart following the winter break, move up to 32 points, one ahead of Bayer 04 Leverkusen.
“We wasted two points today and this is the reason I am a bit angry,” Pizarro, the Bundesliga’s all-time foreign goal scorer, told reporters. “We needed these points so that the teams ahead of us don’t pull away too much, but we lacked concentration at some instances, especially set-pieces.”
In the only other game on Sunday, Cologne, without their injured top scorer Lukas Podolski, snatched a 1-0 win at relegation-threatened Kaiserslautern and three crucial points in their bid to stay up.
Albania international Odise Roshi’s 72nd-minute header lifted them to ninth place on 24 points.
Kaiserslautern, reduced to 10 men late in the first half after the dismissal of new signing Ariel Borysiuk for a second booking, are in the relegation playoff spot on 18 points, a point off the bottom.
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