Bayer 04 lost the second leg of the last 16 of the Champions League against Bayern Munich 0-2 – and possibly also defender Mario Hermoso. The Spaniard suffered a shoulder injury and had to be taken to hospital for examination. There are personnel shortages in the defense.
Mario Hermoso let his guard down for a moment. In the 31st minute, Leverkusen’s defender made a positioning error on the right side against Munich’s goal machine Harry Kane and was only able to stop the Englishman, who was about to start towards the goal, by committing a foul. The yellow card for the Spaniard was inevitable, but to make matters worse, he injured his right shoulder in the process.
Hermoso had to go to the hospital for an X-ray
The left-footer had apparently dislocated his shoulder. Although the loan signing from AS Roma tried again after intensive treatment, the 29-year-old was forced to withdraw from the game seven minutes after his unfortunate fall. Does this mean that Bayer could face its next injury problem? “We don’t know yet. He’s going to the hospital for an X-ray now, and there will be an MRI scan tomorrow,” said coach Xabi Alonso after the game. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
If Hermoso is out, Bayer faces a defensive bottleneck. Edmond Tapsoba has also been struggling with thigh problems since before the Frankfurt game. The national player from Burkina Faso was on the substitutes’ bench against Bayern, but he was unable to play. This became clear when Hermoso was injured. Xabi Alonso replaced Robert Andrich and ordered him to the center of defense and not Tapsoba. The last option, since Nordi Mukiele was suspended due to a yellow-red card and Jeanuel Belocian has been out with a cruciate ligament rupture since January.
Tapsoba and Tella are also questionable for the Stuttgart game
“He wasn’t ready to play today,” said Xabi Alonso regarding Tapsoba, and the same applied to striker Nathan Tella, who many expected in the starting lineup and whom the coach had apparently also planned on. “A lot has happened in a week,” said Xabi Alonso, “it would have been good for both of them to have been able to play.”
But that was out of the question. “This morning we tried it. The decision was that neither of them were ready. Yesterday they only trained 50 percent,” explained Xabi Alonso, who did not want to make a prediction for the game in Stuttgart yet: “We’ll have to see what happens on Sunday.”
Xabi Alonso only had four really fit outfield players on the bench
The fact that the duo against FC Bayern still appeared on the match sheet and took a seat on the substitute bench was commented on by Xabi Alonso with gallows humor: “There was space on the bench, so they could sit there.”
So the Spaniard had nine substitutes officially available to him in theory, but these included two goalkeepers, Tapsoba and Tella, who were not able to play, and Jonas Hofmann, who had missed the final training session after coming down with an infection.
