Whenever a team languishes, as Bayer Leverkusen has been doing for weeks, until sooner or later the coach is said goodbye, two questions always arise: Did the players have had enough of the coach and in the end – as it is in football German so nice and casual means – played against him? Or did they really want him to stay? And did they get more and more nervous with every bad pass, every mistake by the goalkeeper, every crooked goal, every hair-raising missed chance, until they became so tense that it looked as if they wanted to force the trainer to be fired?
From what you hear, Gerardo Seoane not only enjoys respect at the Werkself, but a lot of sympathy – and not just because the Swiss is such a friendly and calm person who is guaranteed not to smash furniture or go into the basement after defeats taking out his frustration on a punching bag.
Rather, it was the case that he turned a good team into an excellent one for everyone to see last season. Under his leadership, Bayer 04 played the kind of spectacular football that those in charge at the plant would like to see as advertising and which sometimes even thrilled viewers who weren’t from Bayer. The team scored 80 goals, third place was the result, and couldn’t there be more?
Because in the summer, Bayer proudly announced that neither Patrik Schick nor Moussa Diaby would leave the club. And in the second half of the season, the long-term injured wonder boy Florian Wirtz would return. Although the Werkself have had a reputation for failing at crucial moments for 25 years, quite a few observers believed Leverkusen could cause serious problems for Bayern this season.
The Leverkusen season is reminiscent of the previous one at Borussia Mönchengladbach
But from the first competitive game – a 3: 4 disgrace in the cup at third division Elversberg – one frustration followed the next. The cohesion crumbled, Seoane made a few difficult to understand trainer decisions. And the great advantage of keeping the core of the team together turned out to be a disadvantage because there is no one who is familiar with such a free fall. In this regard, one feels reminded of last season, when Borussia Mönchengladbach started with an almost unchanged squad and title dreams and ended in tenth place.
Like Gladbach back then, all Leverkusen players have been so busy with their own shortcomings and looking for their buried strengths for weeks that they don’t have time to take care of their team-mates. The saddest example is the otherwise so amusing and self-deprecating goalkeeper Lukas Hradecky, who recently made so many grotesque mistakes that he prefers to remain silent and looks like a melancholic character from the films of his Finnish compatriot Aki Kaurismäki.
If Seoane were now replaced by Xabi Alonso at Bayer Leverkusen, it would be an even bigger number. The Spaniard is still quite new to the business as a coach. But he is not only an incredibly friendly person, he also brings with him the glamor of the world and European champion trophies, which he lifted as a player between 2008 and 2012. And as a player, he knew only too well when to unpack the tackle.