Falling giants? Werder Bremen, Wolfsburg and Gladbach circle Bundesliga drain

Falling giants? Werder Bremen, Wolfsburg and Gladbach circle Bundesliga drain Threat of relegation looms over former league champions who can still be accused of living off past glories “W e currently have zero self-confidence,” lamented Marco Friedl, “and it shows.” Werder Bremen had just come to the end of a 13th successive winless game and there was a sense that they didn’t realise that the bottom was quite this low – if indeed they are quite there. “I often have the right words, but today I’m pretty much speechless because I couldn’t have imagined the game ending like this.” It is difficult to predict quite how this season will finish at the bottom of the Bundesliga but it feels like it has a big ending in store, with at least one big name set to tumble. This felt like a big moment for Bremen, the 2004 double winners, in freefall for months and unable to find the decisive moment away to St Pauli as Sunday evening drew in. They looked like the better team for the best part of an hour but they weren’t the more poised; the young goalkeeper Mio Backhaus, one of the rare beacons of hope in a wretched season, almost inexplicably allowed a Hauke Wahl header through him for the opening goal and despite a Jovan Milosevic equaliser a smooth, coherent home move was finished by Joel Fujita for the winner. A winner which, significantly, took St Pauli above Werder, pushing them into the bottom two synonymous with automatic relegation. Having looked next to gone a few short weeks back, successive home wins have now taken Alexander Blessin’s team to 20 points which, remarkably, is the same as Wolfsburg . The 2009 champions had felt as if they were reviving in recent matches, despite not winning, with a deserved draw at Leipzig last week following an excellent but unrewarded display against Borussia Dortmund in their last home game. But the Volkswagen Arena has been a miserable place for Die Wölfe this term; with a mere nine points from 12 games theirs is the worst home record i...