European NAP: Eagles can fly high on Sunday

EUROPEAN football fanatic Mark O'Haire (@MarkOHaire) is looking to continue his hot European NAP streak with a selection from Sunday's Bundesliga action.

Eintracht Frankfurt v Wolfsburg | Sunday 2nd December 2018, 17:00 | BT Sport

Eintracht Frankfurt lifted the DFB Pokal and tabled a top-half finish under Niko Kovac last season but with the Croat moving to Bayern Munich in the summer, the club opted to bring in Adi Hutter as their new head coach.

Hutter was the first Austrian to win a league title abroad as his success with Young Boys last term ended Basel’s eight-year monopoly in Switzerland. Nevertheless, he was starting the campaign without a number of last term’s leading lights, pilfered during the off-season by bigger and richer rivals.

Die Adler’s most creative player, Marius Wolf, joined Dortmund and the mercurial Kevin-Prince Boateng departed, along with Lucas Hradecky and Omar Mascarell weakening the ranks. And following the ignominy of a first round DFB Pokal exit to lower league opposition, plus a Super Cup shellacking by Bayern, the pressure was immediate on.

However, Eintracht have turned things around remarkably well. The new boss is a polar opposite in terms of system to Kovac, preferring a 4-4-2 and his team to press hard, take risks and attack at every opportunity. It’s an approach that’s taken time to adjust to, but the recent results have been stunning.

Frankfurt qualified from their devilishly difficult Europa League group alongside Marseille, Lazio and Apollon Limassol with two games to spare, thrashing Marseille 4-0 at their Mercedes-Benz Arena base to cement their phenomenal impressive 100% continental record ahead of matchday six.

As well as those famous European triumphs, Die Adler’s swashbuckling attacking play has catapulted them into the top-three of the Bundesliga. Eintracht’s shellacking of Marseille was their 10th in 11 encounters across all competitions (W10-D1-L0) as they’ve plundered a barely believable 34 goals in that sample.

The front four of Filip Kostic, Ante Rebic, Luka Jovic and Sebastien Haller are in frightening form. Jovic and Haller have scored 21 goals between them in that aforementioned 11-game run with the former taking his season-long tally to 14 in 17 appearances despite being the tender age of 20.

Hutter’s troops have generated an average of 2.26 Expected Goals in those 11 recent outings and I’m happy to count on the hosts putting on another electric effort in the final-third by backing Eintracht Frankfurt to score Over 1.5 Goals at 5/6 with Betfair on Sunday evening.

The home side have beaten this line in 10 of their last 11, scoring at least three goals on eight occasions. That should stand Die Adler in good stead against a stodgy Wolfsburg side that’s W2-D3-L5 in their past 10 Bundesliga fixtures, recording three shutouts across their 12 league tussles this term.

The Wolves have W1-D4-L5 when visiting top-half teams since the start of last season, and come up against an Eintracht outfit that have W10-D1-L2 here when excluding top-six clubs.