A match report sheet like this provides a rough overview, but not much more than that. Player names are assigned shirt numbers, and if you feel like it, you can mentally distribute these shirt numbers on the pitch before kick-off. On Saturday, practice on the pitch revealed something almost unseen before: number 23, which belongs to Hamburg midfielder Jonas Meffert, was noticeably often out and about in regions that she had not recently moved into. According to reputable heat maps, when the opponent Hansa Rostock had the ball, the 23 could be found in the middle of the defense; Furthermore, surrounded by four other players who, not so long ago, would probably have stormed forward instead.
It’s easy to guess what the young man, whose name appeared for the first time under the heading “head coach” on a match report sheet, wanted to achieve: The previous assistant Merlin Polzin, 33, who has been coaching HSV on an interim basis since the beginning of the week, wanted that Build a more stable team. To do this, he came up with this conservative tactic and sometimes shifted the number of players back a bit. Unfortunately, from Hamburg’s point of view, he didn’t manage to do one thing: make HSV really more stable.
The second division game in Rostock, which was perhaps the last with head coach Polzin, ended 2-2, perhaps not. And that tells you a lot about what you currently need to know about this traditional club: Coaches in Kaiserslautern, Mainz and Hamburg were released this week, but only in Kaiserslautern and Mainz do they know which coach they want to play with for the rest of the season. In Hamburg they realized that the radical offensive advocate Tim Walter was unlikely to be able to achieve promotion. However, they have obviously not yet developed a concrete plan as to how and with whom they want to continue. And that’s exactly how HSV played football on Saturday.
At the back, HSV presented itself as attentive and serious for its circumstances
It was exemplary and commendable that Polzin looked at the opponent and made considerations with which to combat Hamburg’s defensive fumbling; In doing so, he pursued an approach that his teacher Walter usually did not even want to pursue. “We could see a lot of things that we had planned and worked on,” said Polzin, and he could actually only mean the first half. The Hamburg team defended with five defenders and still had a monopoly on the ball, as they learned in the two and a half years at Walter.
It didn’t look really exciting, but that was okay as long as this phase of the game went as it did: At the back, with a few exceptions, the Hamburg team presented themselves as attentive and serious for their standards. And the nimble wing attacker Jean-Luc Dompé scored in front when he scurried past the opponent with a step-over combination and shot the ball into the goal (34th minute).
This is what theorists imagined at HSV: If Hamburg gets their defense sorted, they have more than enough quality up front to score more than their opponents. However, the practice didn’t really want to go along with it. The team appeared “erratic” in the second half, complained striker Robert Glatzel, “too lax and with too little speed”. The shocking thing was that, despite the stabilization measures initiated by the interim coach, HSV showed exactly the face that it no longer wanted to show – and it was irrelevant that Polzin mentioned the declaration of intent for “more stability” about as often as Christian Lindner invokes belief in a free market economy.
Holstein Kiel is four points ahead, city rival St. Pauli even further
Hamburg missed a great opportunity to make it 2-0 and instead conceded the 1-1 (52nd minute) because they did not protect the depth well enough and were inattentive in guarding their penalty area after the Rostock cross. A weak back pass from a Hamburg player became an assist for an opposing attacker (82′), this time it was former striker Ransford Königsdörffer, who has had to play everything except striker for months. And although HSV was now mostly out of the game, they somehow found their way in thanks to a goal from Glatzel (86th) – even though the Rostock team, who were threatened with relegation, not wrongly noted to the referee that one of their players was injured on the ground during the attack.
HSV, which has a provisional coach and is perhaps still looking for one, has to think about this again indifferent performance. Second-placed Holstein Kiel is four points ahead, league leaders FC St. Pauli can be seven points away after this matchday. Meanwhile, Steffen Baumgart, who is obviously willing to work, is waiting for a call from Hamburg, which may or may not come. And with him a few other candidates who could have been presented long ago if sports director Jonas Boldt had wanted to do it this week. In any case, this HSV could do with a fresh impulse.