Conference League Qualification
Second leg against Fehérvár: 1. FC Köln have to shed their overconfidence if they don’t want to fail
Cologne coach Steffen Baumart (r.) Having fun with the players Jonas Hector (middle) and Florian Kainz about a week ago. The mood was good then.
© Roberto Pfeil / DPA
1. FC Köln went into the qualifier for the Conference League against Fehérvár FC with great self-confidence and a lot of emotion – and learned the hard way. In the second leg they want to do everything better.
The coach of 1. FC Köln, Steffen Baumgart, was too late for the press conference in Szekesfehérvár. The reason was simple: Baumgart had let his team train longer before the playoff second leg to the Conference League on Thursday at Fehérvár FC (7 p.m. / RTL +). In the end, however, he sat on the podium to answer the journalists’ questions. “I don’t apologize. Training is more important. And I hope that everyone understands that,” he said in greeting.
After the 2-1 defeat in the first leg, Baumgart doesn’t want to leave anything to chance. The euro fairy tale should not end before it has really begun. He doesn’t want to give excuses. “The place is very good. The hospitality too, the hotel is fine, the flight was fine,” Baumgart said. “All in all, it’s a very, very good setting for watching a good game.”
Mixture of anger, defiance and determination
The team landed in Budapest on Wednesday afternoon with a mixture of anger, defiance and determination. She doesn’t need a miracle in the second leg but she needs a good day and avoiding silly mistakes like being sent off if her dream of Europe is not to end. “It’s clear that it hasn’t gotten any easier,” said Baumgart. “We’re falling behind. But we’re convinced that we’re able to turn the result around.”
This requires a learning effect. Before the first leg, the euphoria around the club and the self-confidence were great, maybe too great. 1. FC Köln clearly saw themselves as the favourites. But it happened as it so often happens. The supposedly weaker opponent came up trumps. Cologne was the better team for 20 minutes and took a 1-0 lead. But the red card for Cologne’s Julian Chabot changed the statics of the game and Cologne lost the game 1:2 in the second half despite being in the lead and having 80 percent ball possession.
It was a classic case of hubris. The red card was of course one of the reasons for the defeat, but it would be too easy to boil it down to that. At least outwardly, that’s what many people from Cologne did. The Hungarians defend well and have always been dangerous, as the two spotless goals proved. And: Just being sent off in such an important game is amateurish. That shouldn’t happen again in the second leg.
Sports Director Keller is preparing
It won’t be easy. Steffen Baumgart’s side need to win by two goals to qualify for the group stage. As a precaution, sports director Christian Keller tried to take the pressure off: “We don’t have to do anything,” he said when asked whether the financially ailing 1. FC, which had already failed in the DFB Cup, should progress simply because of the additional income of around ten million euros . The most important lesson from the first leg was “to keep expectations reasonable,” said Keller.
The sports director is preparing because he knows that the end against the Hungarian club would suddenly extinguish the euphoria in the FC environment. For the only second European Cup season in the last 30 years, extra jerseys were created, rapper Mo-Torres wrote a song called “Effzeh International”, the club puts the season under the motto “Mer fiere dä FC – den Kölle & Europa” (“We celebrate FC – in Cologne & Europe”). Maybe it would have been better to wait with the shirts and the song until you actually qualified. The people of Cologne would not be the first to fail in reality with a mixture of naivety and pretended self-confidence.
Sources: DPA,”table football“, “Express”