The DFB-Pokal first round weekend got underway with three matches on Friday night, however anyone hoping for an upset will be disappointed as the big guns all comfortably won through to the second round.
Holders Bayern Munich delivered a routine 5-0 win over Carl Zeiss Jena, with Robert Lewandowksi scoring a first-half hat-trick. Fellow Bundesliga side FC Augsburg won 2-0 against FV Ravensburg, whilst FC St. Pauli beat VFB Lübeck in a derby encounter.
Carl Zeiss Jena 0-5 Bayern Munich
After their DFL-Supercup victory against Borussia Dortmund on Sunday night, Bayern started their defence of the Pokal with a trip to Thuringia to play Jena, who currently play in Regionalliga Nordost, the German fourth tier. The three-time East German champions’ biggest achievement was reaching their 1981 Cup Winners’ Cup final. They lost that to Dinamo Tbilisi, but along the way beat an AS Roma side containing a certain Carlo Ancelotti.
Jena have hovered around in the lower leagues since reunification, and as a result have never actually played Bayern. Unfortunately for them, Bayern needed just three minutes to take the lead. Thomas Müller saved Lewandowski’s blushes after he miskicked his original, giving it back to him to open his account for the season. Lewandowski then scored twice more to complete a hat-trick inside just 45 minutes.
In the second half, Arturo Vidal hit the woodwork twice, but he did score the fourth, after Lewandowski saw he was in a much better position than himself to score. And to round things off, substitute Mats Hummels headed in a Joshua Kimmich corner to score his first ever goal for his boyhood club.
FV Ravensburg 0-2 FC Augsburg
One of the smallest teams to make it into the competition are FV Ravensburg, who finished ninth in the fifth tier Oberliga Baden-Württemberg last season and qualified by winning last season’s Württemberg-Pokal. Their reward? The visit of Augsburg, playing under Dirk Schuster for the first time. The game was played around 40 kilometres away at the Gebreit-Arena, home of SC Pfullendorf, which is bigger than Ravensburg's own Ebra-Stadion.
They needed a little longer than Bayern to opening the scoring, but it came in the 30th minute, with Koo Ja-Cheol coolly finishing after Caiuby’s flick. A double block on the line and the post denied them the chance to double the lead before half time. But the ‘hosts’ should have had a penalty when Robert Henning was clearly fouled in the box by Caiuby.
Ravensburg stayed in the game for some while longer, but any chance of the underdogs coming back appeared over when Raúl Bobadilla struck in with just over twenty minutes. And they finished with ten men, with Rahman Soyudogru receiving a second yellow card after a clash on the goal line with Marwin Hitz, who was also booked
VFB Lübeck 0-1 FC St. Pauli
After finished fourth in the 2. Bundesliga last season, St. Pauli avoided a tough tie like the one they got against Borussia Mönchengladbach in last season’s Pokal. They did have to content with a local derby, with a short trip northeast to Lübeck, who were fresh from a league win against, remarkably enough, St. Pauli’s second team in Regionalliga Nord.
St. Pauli took the lead with a beautifully placed free-kick from new by Vegar Eggen Hedenstad after 15 minutes, getting the ball over the wall with goalkeeper Jonas Toboll unable to do enough to keep it out.
With around an hour gone they made it two. Christopher Butchmann’s free-kick was wonderfully headed in by Sören Gonther, who appeared to jump higher than anyone else to get to the ball first. And then Marvin Ducksch, just moments after coming in, made it three with a good finish two minutes from time.