RB Leipzig show no signs of a hangover to keep pace with Bayern Munich

You’d only expect it to happen once in a generation at best, not twice in a decade. RB Leipzig’s spectacular first half of the season is not without precedent, though. The parallels with the last promoted club from Bundesliga 2. to make their presence felt at the top-flight’s summit so immediately after promotion have come thick and fast – perhaps unsurprisingly, since Hoffenheim’s coach in their lightning start to their Bundesliga debut campaign of 2008-09 was Ralf Rangnick, who is now Leipzig’s sporting director, having guided the team to promotion last season.

There’s plenty more room for comparison; having shot up from regional league obscurity on the back of big bucks, Leipzig have also followed the Hoff’s example of investing the wealth on excellent young players. Much of Germany’s football public also hoped that, like Hoffenheim in early 2009, the bottom would fall out for Leipzig post-Christmas. Having been Herbstmeister – “autumn champions” – Hoffenheim dropped out of the European places entirely and ultimately finished seventh.

If the Hoffenheim effect was going to hit, then it was probably going to be here and now, with the Swedish midfielder Emil Forsberg (who was the team’s star pre-Christmas) suspended after being sent off in the 3-0 humbling at Bayern Munich directly before the break. Bayern Munich – in the shape of Karl-Heinz Rummenigge - were clear in the run-up to the restart that they were more concerned about Borussia Dortmund rather than Leipzig as a principal rival for the second half of the season.

Enter Eintracht Frankfurt, much to the eventual delight of Rangnick, coach Ralph Hasenhüttl and his players. Niko Kovac’s side were another surprise shooting star of the pre-Winterpause Bundesliga, but Saturday’s match was two minutes old was Eintracht goalkeeper Lukas Hradecky rushed from his goal to shut down the run of Leipzig full-back Bernardo and slipped. He successfully smothered the ball with both hands.

Unfortunately for the Finn, he was five yards outside his area at the time. Referee Deniz Aytekin showed him Hradecky the red card, 131 seconds after the game kicked off – the fastest-ever sending off for a goalkeeper in the league’s 54-year history. “I had to decide quickly,” Hradecky told Sky afterwards. “If I was in doubt, I’d do it again.”

Heinz Lindner was ushered on to make his Bundesliga debut for the club, almost two years after joining. With his first touch, he made a good save from the free-kick resulting from Hradecky’s wandering hands, struck by Marcel Halstenberg. With his second, Lindner was picking the ball out of the net, after Marvin Compper buried the rebound.

It was rarely in doubt from that point onwards, even if Hasenhüttl was later critical of his team’s first-half performance, asserting that Timo Werner’s goal to make it 2-0 on the brink of the interval was conjured “from nowhere”.Those high standards are part of what suggest die Roten Bullen are the real deal. This win made Leipzig the best-performing promoted team at the season’s halfway point in Bundesliga history. Kaiserslautern, who won the title as new boys in 1997-98, also had 39 points after 17 matches in that season, but with an inferior goal difference to Leipzig’s. If this feels like a sea change in German football, that’s because it is one.

The unashamedly corporate nature of the Leipzig model will never sit well for many palates, but the on-pitch quality, and poise, is undeniable. There was some debate on how Hasenhüttl would cover the absence of Forsberg. The answer for Leipzig-watchers this season should have been clear, with their versatility again apparent as Naby Keita was moved into a more advanced position. The 21-year-old had been a doubt with a hamstring problem going into the match, but it didn’t show. He was relentless, and ran the game.

It would be overdoing it to say that Leipzig are close to mainstream acceptance, but people are starting to get used to them. Lukas Podolski, in his column for Fussball Bild this week, probably spoke for many. “I stand for football tradition,” the now-Galatasaray forward wrote, before admitting a grudging admiration for Leipzig’s sporting ethos. “The money is used professionally and well. The club has a clear structure and philosophy.”

Incidentally Hoffenheim are next up at the Red Bull Arena on Saturday afternoon – and the visitors arrive as the only unbeaten team in Europe’s top five leagues following Real Madrid’s loss at Sevilla last weekend. “Maybe a first defeat (here),” suggested Rangnick to Sky post-match, a rare hint of boldness during an interview in which he coyly said he “wouldn’t mind” Champions League football. Perhaps he does see Leipzig’s differences from his Hoffenheim team just as clearly as the rest of us.

Raphael Honigstein is currently writing a book and will be back at the start of the 2017-18 season

Talking points

After concluding their pre-Christmas business with that emphatic, and joyously savoured, win over Leipzig, Bayern showed a grittier side to their character in Friday night’s curtain-(re)raiser, prising a 2-1 win from Freiburg’s Schwarzwald-Stadion, despite going a goal down after four minutes and enduring temperatures that plummeted to -7C. A double from Robert Lewandowski, including a stoppage-time winner, eventually did the trick, overcoming a rusty display from the likes of Xabi Alonso. Spare a thought for Freiburg, too – the other promoted side have been excellent, but largely overshadowed by the Leipzig story.

With Thomas Tuchel finally getting some time to coach his much-changed Dortmund squad, we were expecting a big improvement, but the new mean, lean BVB didn’t quite materialise at Werder Bremen on Saturday. After taking an early lead via Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s stand-in, André Schürrle, they made heavy weather of beating opponents who played for more than a half with 10 men. Still, their stockpiling of elite young talent shows little sign of slowing down with the arrival of Sweden’s Alexander Isak, the 17-year-old ‘new Zlatan’ who, besides his nationality, is actually nothing like Zlatan.

There were a clutch of debuts this weekend, notably at Darmstadt’s Böllenfalltor, where Torsten Frings led his first Bundesliga match as a coach for the home side and on the opposite side, Dieter Hecking made his bow as Borussia Mönchengladbach coach (his 333rd game on a Bundesliga bench). A goalless draw allowed both to escape with pride and hope intact, though Rheinische Post lamented that Gladbach’s performance wasn’t quite as smooth as that of their sporting director, Max Eberl, on that evening’s Das Aktuelle Sportstudio on ZDF.

On the playing side, Wolfsburg’s de facto replacement for Julian Draxler, Paul-Georges Ntep, capped an electrifying display by laying a late winner on a plate for Mario Gomez to beat Hamburg, while the former Cardiff City dud, Guido Burgstaller, celebrated joyously after snaffling a late winner for his new club Schalke against basement boys Ingolstadt.

Results: Freiburg 1-2 Bayern Munich, Wolfsburg 1-0 Hamburg, Werder Bremen 1-2 Borussia Dortmund, Augsburg 0-2 Hoffenheim, Schalke 1-0 Ingolstadt, Darmstadt 0-0 Borussia Mönchengladbach, RB Leipzig 3-0 Eintracht Frankfurt, Bayer Leverkusen 3-1 Hertha Berlin, Mainz 0-0 Köln.