Relegation woes

It's not as if Eintracht Frankfurt have not experienced moments of euphoria this season.

Back in December, in the last round of 2010, Eintracht handed eventual champions Dortmund only their second loss of the year. The win took the perennially mid-table team up to a comfortable seventh in the standings and had fans dreaming of Europe next season.

Then in March, after the train had run off the rails, the club sacked coach Michael Skibbe and hired Christoph Daum. Such was the optimism engendered by the former Bundesliga winner, coach of the year and almost German national team trainer that 2,000 supporters turned out to watch his first practice session with the team.

But five rounds later, the enthusiasm is history. Under Daum, the team has earned only three points and will be battling to stay up until the final day of the season.

Frankfurt's 3-0 defeat away at bitter rivals Mainz on Saturday - a scoreline that was flattering - represented a new nadir and saw the team drift down to the relegation zone for the first time this season.

"We are now engaged in a pure fight for survival," a disappointed Daum told reporters. "Every last player should have noticed by now that all the alarm bells are ringing."

Indeed. Frankfurt's decline in 2011 has been so precipitous that it can hardly have escaped anyone's attention. A grand total of eight points earned and a goal difference of minus 17 speak loudly enough that no additional noise should be necessary.

But the problem is that Frankfurt's main problems are painfully obvious.

Missing the mark, again and again

As floundering teams go, Frankfurt haven't been particularly bad. In fact, they've had a decent chance of winning in all but four of their matches in the second half of the season.

But to win, as the old adage goes, you have to score, and that is something Eintracht simply have not been able to do. Frankfurt have found the back of the net a grand total of six times in 2011, despite having roughly five or six times that number of chances.

Probably the most painful miss of all came in round 31. With Frankfurt improbably leading Bayern Munich in the 82nd minute, striker Theofanis Gekas found himself all alone three meters from goal - only to perform a bit of slapstick worthy of Peter Sellers. The match ended 1-1.

The Greek national has done a fair amount of Clouseau-esque stumbling and bumbling this year, but he hardly deserves to be the sole scapegoat. If anything, it's his striker partners who have failed to carry their weight.

Gekas scored 14 of 24 Frankfurt's goals in the first half of the season, masking Eintracht's lack of quality in attack. Once the hot-and-cold Greek cooled off, Frankfurt found itself unable to hit the broadside of a barn.

At least half of scoring goals is mental. Frankfurt have created an average number of chances, but their conversion rate, one in six, is by far and away the worst in the league.

And far from helping his players overcome their mental block, Daum seems to have made it worse. That is perhaps due to the circumstances under which he arrived.

Bad karma?

Eintracht are traditionally a club that sticks with coaches through disappointment. So it was a surprise when they axed Skibbe immediately after he had succeeded in ending a nine-game winless streak with a victory against St. Pauli - Eintracht's last win to date.

Daum is one of the most charismatic and best-known coaches in German football. But despite the euphoria surrounding his engagement by the Main River, his successes came fairly far back in the past, and his name recognition is based on notoriety.

Back in 2000, Daum came literally within a hair's breadth of coaching the German national team. But accused of cocaine consumption while waiting to take up the post, he agreed to submit a lock or two for testing, and it promptly came back positive.

Between then and his current job, Daum won titles in Turkey, but his one other coaching stint in Germany, with Cologne, was a mixed bag. So the suspicion arises that Frankfurt's management were blinded by a marquee name when they decided to replace the relatively popular Skibbe with the 57-year-old Daum.

In any case, a few hundred fans turned up at Frankfurt's stadium to meet the team upon their return from their defeat in Mainz, and the welcome wasn't friendly. Police had to be called in, and at least one warning shot fired, to convince outraged supporters to curb their tempers.

Frankfurt then cancelled two days of practices after the authorities advised them that showing their faces in public might be too dangerous - hardly the thing to calm the nerves of a team already beset with jitters.

Daum now has two games to re-teach Frankfurt the fine art of putting a round ball into a 8x7.3 meter square goal. Otherwise the club faces relegation to the second division for the fourth time in its history.

Author: Jefferson Chase
Editor: Rob Turner