Bravo to Batz as he is the DFB-Pokal Player of the Round
On Tuesday, Saarbrucken shocked the country when they eliminated Bundesliga side Fortuna Dusseldorf out of the DFB-Pokal at the quarter-final stage.
Daniel Batz was the hero of the night, as he saved a penalty during normal time and then, when it went to penalties after a 1-1 draw, he went on to save FOUR more during the penalty shootout! Overall, he made a quite remarkable 14 saves.
In the shootout, he saved penalties from Mathias Jorgensen, Matthias Zimmermann, Kevin Stoger, and Kenan Karaman.
Bayern progressed to the semi-final, too, thanks to a solitary goal from Joshua Kimmich in a 1-0 away victory at Schalke.
Following a Philippe Coutinho corner, Kimmich holds his position at the edge of the box to latch on to a clearance to drill a bouncing half volley across the box into the bottom left corner to emerge as the match winner.
He impressed in other areas, though, completing a ridiculous 156 passes out of 164 attempts, while enjoying 180 touches of the ball. To put that into context, the next highest tallies for those stats in this round of fixtures belong to David Alaba with 125 completed passes and Kevin Stoger with 154 touches.
Thiago was, unusually, outpassed by one of his team-mates in Kimmich for Bayern, but his distribution was still fantastic as he completed 122/131 balls to team-mates, with 36 of those being sent into the final third.
Actually, this time the Spain international contributed to the tougher side of the game, and with huge success too as he won 15/18 duels and made 15 ball recoveries which was more than any player in the quarter finals.
He won 5/6 aerial duels, too, but that probably says more about Schalke than it does Thiago.