“I’m very angry,” said Adi Hütter. He said it very calmly. He didn’t have a crimson face. He didn’t use strong language. You never really notice how the Borussia Mönchengladbach coach is feeling. You have to believe him when he says he’s angry, and there was definitely a reason for that.
Gladbach had lost the DFB Cup round of 16 at second division club Hannover 96 0: 3. The disgrace is even worse when you know that Gladbach could have lost the game 0:6. It’s still the same team that 15 months ago wrested points from Inter Milan and Real Madrid and twice duplicated Donetsk’s chess goal. The same team that, under coach Marco Rose, celebrated entering the last 16 of the Champions League with exuberant dancing. The same players.
But on Wednesday evening in Hanover, these players looked pale, lethargic and lacking in ambition. It is the same dull footballers who have lost six of the last eight competitive games, who are only fighting relegation in the Bundesliga and who have now missed the great opportunity to win the first title for this club in 27 years in a cup competition without overwhelming favorites to win. “I just don’t get it,” said captain Lars Stindl after the game. The great desperation was only partially noticeable to him. You had to believe him when he said he didn’t understand.
Stindl lacks any understanding of the performance of his Gladbachers
There is currently only one man at Borussia Mönchengladbach whose despair is physically noticeable. At the press conference the day before the cup game, sports director Max Eberl gave the impression that he was about to throw himself off the podium. The otherwise talkative Lower Bavarian only squeezed out a few words, accidentally called the coach Adi Hütter “Dieter” twice and made a worrying impression.
Do you have to worry about Adi Hütter when your boss calls you Dieter? Hütter was asked about the disgrace in Hanover whether he was afraid of his job. “No,” he answered briefly, concisely and without emotion. You just had to believe the Austrian, who signed for 7.5 million euros from Eintracht Frankfurt just six months ago.
“We talked for a long time during the winter break and actually thought we had made a step forward,” said Stindl. The Gladbachers won the first game after this analytical discussion at FC Bayern 2-1, but they already lost the second game against Bayer Leverkusen 1-2 and after the 0-3 in Hanover Borussia is now back where it was the four major defeats at the end of last year (1:4 in Cologne, 0:6 against Freiburg, 1:4 in Leipzig, 2:3 against Frankfurt).
The problem is that you don’t get the feeling that a new coach could improve anything at the moment. Gladbach needs a renewed team. The key players Denis Zakaria, Marcus Thuram, Alassane Plea and Matthias Ginter (who played again from the start in Hanover) can no longer give this team any emotional input. “We were quite surprised at how little resistance Mönchengladbach showed,” said Hanoverian player Sebastian Kerk, perplexed. The opponent said Gladbach on it, but Gladbach is no longer there. In the food industry, the “deceptive package of the year” is unmasked every year. In the Bundesliga this season it is Borussia Mönchengladbach.
On Saturday, the Gladbachers will welcome Union Berlin in the Bundesliga, a team that demonstrates the concept of “intrinsic motivation” like no other. However, in order for footballers to be able to motivate themselves optimally in every game, there needs to be a clean air in the squad, and that doesn’t seem to be the case at Borussia at the moment. Since the former coach Rose announced his departure from Borussia Dortmund a year ago and three months later, this team has been running out of breath. And the new coach Hütter finds no remedy.
“On Saturday we have to field the right eleven players who accept the situation and counteract it very clearly,” says Hütter. You can clearly hear that this will be a tricky task in the training sessions in the second half of the week. Whether a Ginter plays or not, a Neuhaus, a Thuram or a Herrmann – the personal details that are so often discussed no longer seem to play a role. Gladbach will have to try to finish the season properly, keep the class and try a fresh start in the summer.