Wolfsburg beat St. Pauli in a final-day game decided by fine margins

Konstantinos Koulierakis was the standout in VfL Wolfsburg's 3-1 win over FC St. Pauli. He scored the opener in the 37th minute from a Christian Eriksen assist, finished with a 7.9 rating, and won the Man of the Match vote. The game also had the kind of moments that decide relegation races, with Nikola Vasilj's own goal restoring Wolfsburg's lead and Eriksen hitting the crossbar with a 77th-minute penalty.

Koulierakis led the day, Eriksen shaped it

The opener set the tone. Koulierakis finished Eriksen's delivery in the 37th minute, and the same combination nearly mattered again when Eriksen kept finding pockets to create chances. That part of the performance was real enough, even if the penalty miss stopped it from becoming the clean, composed display Wolfsburg probably wanted.

The numbers back up the eye test. Koulierakis led the ratings at 7.9, and the match report says he comfortably won the Man of the Match poll with 37 percent of the votes. That is a fair call. He scored, he defended the lead, and he was the most important Wolfsburg player on the pitch.

How the late moments settled both teams' fate

Wolfsburg's second goal came from Nikola Vasilj's own goal in the 64th minute. That should have taken the tension out of the afternoon, but Eriksen's penalty hitting the crossbar in the 77th minute kept the game open for a little longer than Wolfsburg would have liked. Dženan Pejčinović then got to the rebound after Eriksen was denied again to finish the scoring.

For St. Pauli, the defeat closed out a miserable end to the campaign. They finished 18th with 26 points, 28 goals scored and 57 conceded, and their two-year stay back in the Bundesliga is over after taking only three points from their final 10 league matches. Abdoulie Ceesay did at least add one more goal from the bench, but it was not enough to change the outcome.

The result leaves Wolfsburg in the relegation play-off, so this was not survival in the strict sense. It was a necessary escape from immediate danger, built on Koulierakis' opener, Vasilj's own goal, and Eriksen's mix of influence and waste in the same afternoon.