Kaiserslautern, on the other hand, could have sent Bayer down. A Lautern victory in Leverkusen and the Rhineland club, who until then had never finished higher than fifth, would have been gone after 27 years in the Bundesliga. Hardly anybody outside the BayArena would have mourned them.
Lautern’s players understood the stakes too. Yet what followed was one of the strangest relegation escapes in league history.
