Werder Bremen storms back from 0-2 down to beat Augsburg 3-2 on Weiser's 92nd-minute winner

The Weserstadion witnessed a heart-stopping finish: with the clock already showing the 92nd minute and a draw looking like the fair result, Mitchell Weiser popped up in the box to net the 3-2 and hand Werder Bremen a comeback that nobody would have predicted at the midpoint of the second half. Augsburg walked away empty-handed after having controlled the scoreline for nearly a full hour.

Manuel Baum's side did its homework in the first half. In the 17th minute, Robin Fellhauer finished off a counterattack with a low shot into the middle of the goal after a pass from Fabian Rieder, and Augsburg went into the break leading 1-0 despite Werder already showing signs of danger through Chuki and Niclas Füllkrug. At the start of the second half, the blow came from a corner: Calvin Brackelmann headed home a point-blank cross from Alexis Claude-Maurice in the 57th minute to make it 0-2, leaving the match, on paper, all but settled in the visitors' favor.

Werder's response

That's when the other half of the match began. Bremen, who had been piling up offensive pressure all game without reward, got their first breakthrough in the 65th minute: Marco Grüll curled a right-footed shot into the top corner from a well-executed free kick by Chuki to make it 1-2. The equalizer took another twenty minutes to arrive, but it came from the team's top man: Niclas Füllkrug, in the 85th minute, finished with his right foot into the top corner from the center of the box to make it 2-2. With the match already in stoppage time, and after five added minutes signaled by the fourth official, Weiser, who had come on from the bench, showed up again, this time finishing left-footed into the far top corner off a cross from Grüll himself, who registered two assists in the comeback. The final 3-2 capped a complete turnaround in the span of barely half an hour.

A dominance that took time to show on the scoreboard

The numbers explain why the result, dramatic script aside, isn't all that surprising when you look at the full run of play. Werder Bremen controlled the ball and created far more chances than their opponent over the 90 minutes.

Our own expected-goals estimate, calculated from the match's shots, backs up that superiority: Werder Bremen generated 2.478 expected goals compared to Augsburg's 0.919. With 20 shots to 7 and nearly double the possession share, the final result ends up being, in essence, a delayed reflection of what happened on the field.

Before kickoff, our projection had split the odds fairly evenly: 36% for a Werder Bremen win, 30% for a draw and 34% for an away win, with a total expected-goals figure of 2.55. The way the match unfolded ended up resembling that even script fairly closely, though the final scoreline, with five goals shared between both teams and a full Bremen comeback in the closing stretch, blew well past that expected-goals number.

What the result leaves behind

With this win, Werder Bremen moves to 7 points from 4 matches played in the Bundesliga, with 2 wins, 1 draw and 1 loss. Augsburg, who also have 7 points from the same number of matches, are left with the feeling of having let slip a two-goal lead they had managed comfortably for a good stretch of the second half. Grüll, with a goal and an assist, and Füllkrug, with the equalizer, were the pieces that sparked the comeback; Weiser, who hadn't even started the match, ended up being the name that decided the game in the dying seconds.