One half to get going
It rained in Wiesbaden on Saturday afternoon, and for 42 minutes it also rained on Bayer Leverkusen’s confidence. The Bundesliga side eventually won 4-0 away at SV Wehen Wiesbaden in their German Cup opener, but the final score tells only part of the story.
Wiesbaden sat deep, stayed compact and refused to crack. The home side held out until the 43rd minute, when Patrick Schick finally found the opening. Just one goal ahead at the break, in a game where the favourites had the ball but not the breakthrough.
The restart settled it inside two minutes. Lucas Vazquez made it 2-0 in the 47th. The nerves vanished there. Not before.
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The substitutes did the rest
Nathan Tella made it 3-0 in the 69th minute, Christian Kofane added the fourth in the 79th. Both came off the bench. That’s often how these cup ties are won: a Bundesliga bench against an opponent whose legs start to go after an hour of graft.
It was Carles Martinez’s first official game in charge of Bayer. A first-round cup tie is always a trap for a coach still getting to know his squad, and Leverkusen looked for long spells like a team searching for rhythm rather than goals.
Wiesbaden did little wrong. They just ran into the usual ceiling of these kinds of fixtures: holding out for one half is one thing, doing it for two is something else entirely.
A trophy Leverkusen have never quite made their own
The German Cup holds a strange place in the club’s history. Leverkusen won it in 1993, then waited until 2024 to lift it again, the same year they claimed their first league title. In between came a long run of near misses that stuck the old second-place tag to the club like glue.
They are into round two without having to break much of a sweat, but they also did nothing to calm the doubts from a first half that would have been punished against a sharper side. The draw will decide whether that mattered.
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