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.
If you had tipped VfL Wolfsburg for the Bundesliga title at the beginning of the season, you would have been declared crazy. If you had been crazy enough to put money on it, you would have been, well, crazy rich. Even Wolfsburg’s coach Felix Magath admitted that before the season he never would have thought that “Wolfsburg have a chance to be German champions.” But on Saturday Wolfsburg won the championship for the first time in their history; sending players and fans absolutely crazy as they all danced around the pitch in a beer-soaked, chaotic frenzy.
All eyes were on Munich this weekend. The excitement was palpable. Bayern’s new coach, Jupp Heynckes, was surrounded by more photographers than a Hollywood star at the Oscars and media pundits lined up to speculate about tactics, formation and personnel. Would the post-Klinsmann era produce a positive result? And most importantly, would Bayern stay in the title race?





