It’s not something you see every day: Wehen Wiesbaden can keep up defensively with the top teams, but must tremble to avoid relegation.

The past few weeks have once again shown just how tight things are in the basement of the Bundesliga 2 table. Schalke 04, five points ahead of 16th place after the 3-3 draw against SC Paderborn, are back in the thick of the relegation mess just one matchday later.

Because both Eintracht Braunschweig (2:1 at SC Paderborn) and Hansa Rostock (1:0 against Greuther Fürth) won, the 5:2 defeat at Hertha BSC has brought Royal Blue dangerously close to 16th and 17th place again.

The same applies to SV Wehen Wiesbaden, who are just one place and one point ahead of Schalke in 13th. The Hessians are among the top teams in the league in one category – namely defense. Wehen have conceded just 34 goals in their 26 games – just as many as Holstein Kiel (second place) and Fortuna Düsseldorf (fourth place). Overall, this is the second-best figure in the league. Only league leaders FC St. Pauli are significantly better with 25 goals conceded.

For comparison: FC Schalke 04, for example, has conceded 54 goals, 20 more than the Wiesbaden team, and has the worst defensive line in the league. The answer to the question as to why Wehen are still so far down the table lies further up the pitch. Because the 34 goals conceded are offset by just 30 of their own

Five of them alone were scored in the last four games. Ivan Prtajin is the face of an attack that is far too harmless overall, scoring nine goals and accounting for almost a third of all Wiesbaden’s goals.

He is set to add a few more in the coming weeks, as a decisive double-header is on the cards: On Sunday, March 31, 1:30 p.m., bottom-of-the-table VfL Osnabrück comes to the Brita Arena, before Wehen takes on sixteenth-placed Hansa Rostock just five days later on Friday, April 5, 1 p.m. With two wins, coach Markus Kauczinski’s team could lay the foundations for staying in the league. A 1:0 would be enough in each case