Football coaches madness, part 2
If you read last week, you’ll remember me dedicating the entire text to the absolute lunacy that has swept through the Bundesliga in the last few weeks, with boards of directors running around like headless chickens and firing coaches left, right and centre.
Well, the bad news is that these chickens are still headless. Bayern München, for example, lost its Champions League round-of-16 decider against Inter Milan and ended up in stormy waters, desperately looking for somewhere to drop anchor and get back to an even keel: to do this, however, they’ll need to offload some ballast in the form of Louis van Gaal, but he just doesn’t want to walk the plank – and, try as they might, the Bavarian boatswains can’t find a replacement first mate. For the moment, he has been saved from going overboard by Franck Ribéry, who shot a winning goal against Freiburg which has at least kept Bayern on course for the Champions League next season. The map who’ll be leading the good ship München through this, however, is likely to be Leverkusen’s Jupp Heynckes.
It’s been a dramatic few days, and as I write, a whole locker-room full of coaches is facing the sack, jockeying to try and find other teams or biting their nails about their first ever trip to the dole office. In fact, the kind of frenetic behind-the-scenes wrangling that’s been going on in the last couple of weeks is something of a novelty for most Bundesliga fans: Van Gaal, Magath, Veh, Skibbe, Littbarski, Dutt, Tuchel, Heynckes – 8 out of the 18 club trainers in Germany’s top football league are making more headlines than the teams they coach.
Right, let’s get this out of the way straight away: my team, Eintracht Frankfurt, lost this weekend, going down 0:2 to VfB Stuttgart. It was their fourth defeat at home in a row and has helped them to an astonishing new record in terms of losing: it’s the seventh game they’ve played without scoring a goal! And as if this weren’t shameful enough, they were up against a Stuttgart team which spent 75 minutes of the game one man down after their captain, Matthieu Delpierre, got a red card for smacking Frankfurt defender Maik Franz. Eintracht put in 30 shots during the game; Theofanis Gekas, top goal scorer of the first half of the season, hit the inside of the post in the 56th minute, and apart from that, Stuttgart’s 22-year-old goalie Sven Ulreich did a tremendous job. Stuttgart coach Bruno Labbadia had put him on the bench last week against Benfica Lissabon, but after the 34-year-old Marc Ziegler injured himself, Ulreich was suddenly flavour of the month again. Frankfurt, too, had a replacement goalie due to injury, but the 22-year-old Ralf Fährmann standing in for Nikolov made a bit of a hash out of the two shots which sent Stuttgart ahead.
I like Pierre Littbarski. First he was one of the country’s most elegant dribblers in midfield, contributing decisively to the World Cup success of 1990. Then he was a coach, with a distinct lack of vanity and an ability to stay focussed and unemotional. This weekend, however, I did find myself wondering about our “Litti”, who has taken over from the luckless Steve McClaren as coach at Wolfsburg. I mean, I know the guy is pretty relaxed, and I know he’s spent the last seven years playing and coaching in Japan, known as it is for its attachment to Buddhist Zen philosophy, but calling your new job “a nice little hobby” in front of television cameras is not really on – especially when your entire team has spent much of this season playing as if their Bundesliga exploits were, for them too, little more than a nice way to pass the time of day, not their primary means of putting food on the table. In fact, they’ve played so poorly that only their goal difference is saving them from the relegation spot; nevertheless, they still lost 1:2 to SC Freiburg this weekend.
Last week, Germany and Italy lined up against each other for a friendly, but the atmosphere was everything but. The reason is that, apart from Brazil, there is no one country against whom Germany has a worse record than Italy: over the last 30 games, they have only booked seven wins against the Italians, whilst drawing nine and losing a disastrous fourteen games. To make matters worse, their last win was 16 years ago, and one of the many defeats they have suffered fell at just the wrong time and in just the wrong competition.
In his native Britain, Wolfsburg’s new coach Steve McClaren has been given a rather nasty nickname: “the wally with a brolly” – or, to English-speakers not versed in the argot of the fair islands, “the idiot with the umbrella”. He got himself this unfortunate moniker due to his poor performance as the English national coach, which reached its lowest point as he passively watched his team suffer a crushing defeat to Croatia from the sidelines – sheltering under an umbrella. As England crashed out of the 2008 European Championship, there was McClaren not moving a muscle and trying to stop himself getting wet: he’ll have trouble ever workin in English football again.
