HSV in the relegation: shaken up with the jackhammer – sport

The final whistle was an hour ago when the reddish evening sun created the atmosphere in which couples promise a future together. Two fans of Hamburger SV wanted to clarify one of the big questions of our time on Sunday. It was a question that is presumably raised a little more often in men’s conversations than among women.

The men were standing in front of the west stand of Rostock’s Ostseestadion when one of them took the initiative. Actually, he said, “the matter is clear,” and his friend immediately agreed: “Hey, but really. There’s no need to wash your hands if you disinfect your hands afterwards anyway.” They nodded to each other and the matter was settled. No trace of adrenaline. A game had just passed that provided the full keyboard of emotions and a wild gallop through old horror stories. HSV won 3-2 at FC Hansa. HSV came back when it was no longer to be expected. HSV held out. HSV kept their nerves. And the HSV refuted the traditional caricature of itself.

Optimism is finally spreading again in Hamburg

The beauty of everyday observations is that they can reveal quite a lot about life. One need only give these everyday observations the necessary importance. So: Did the conversation between the two gentlemen say anything about the coolness that HSV has recently radiated? About the naturalness with which challenges are tackled and overcome? And is this attitude slowly being transferred to the followers, who probably don’t even know exactly which of the many embarrassments in recent years was actually the most embarrassing?

Well, maybe the scene didn’t have any deeper meaning. Maybe they were just two gentlemen who don’t like to wash their hands after peeing. Point.

That’s exactly how Tim Walter would probably explain it. The Hamburg coach doesn’t like to give professorial lectures, but in every press conference and in every interview he unwinds the same classic hits record, which could soon be exhibited in the HSV Pantheon in the platinum version. Because next Monday the second of the two promotion relegation games against the first division representative Hertha BSC is on the program – and if HSV again shows “total conviction” in these duels and “overcomes resistance”, the chances are not bad that Walter and his team could achieve a real novelty in the not exactly uneventful HSV club history: Hamburg’s first promotion ever. After four years second class.

The HSV coach Tim Walter talks his players strong until they believe in it themselves

During this time, the myth of HSV suffered a few dents, scrapes and scratches, and for that reason alone it was remarkable that the coach Walter, who was hired at the beginning of the season, did not exactly work with kid gloves from day one. On the contrary, he shook up the tired traditional site with a jackhammer. Regular observers of training reported impulsive speeches and occasional outbursts of anger, but in face-to-face meetings and in public, Walter spoke strongly to his players. Again and again. Over and over again. And at some point the players of Walter’s story believed that they were indestructible.

“We kept getting up. We never gave up”: Hamburg’s Robert Glatzel.

(Photo: Martin Rose/Getty Images)

“We kept falling down,” said HSV striker Robert Glatzel on Sunday, who scored 22 goals this season: “But we kept getting up. We never gave up. Everyone wrote us off, again today.” That summarized the recent development of HSV very precisely. The players didn’t care if they got a bloody nose falling on their muzzles, because they knew there was soon to be another football game and this football game had to be played to the end first.

In the relegation it is now against the HSV legend Felix Magath. Tim Walter doesn’t care at all.

It therefore fits perfectly into the HSV season that everything had to be complicated on matchday 34, otherwise it would have been boring. It got complicated, for example, when Hamburg fell behind early on in Rostock, and things didn’t get any easier when the Hansa players started to develop fantasies about falling favorites. But the current HSV is different than its immediate predecessors, because it likes problems and resistance and knows what to do when things get out of hand: pass, pass, pass – and with every pass the players win bit of clarity, of orientation.

In this respect, it was almost logical that the young striker Mikkel Kaufmann of all people, after Glatzel’s equalizer and Sebastian Schonlau’s opening goal, scored a perfect flick to make it 3-1 in the meantime. Because Kaufmann, a player on loan from Copenhagen, had noticed in his previous assignments above all through a lack of orientation, which had already been interpreted by observers as an absolute lack of talent.

Of course, Hamburg coach Walter always saw things differently. And he can’t do much with the dramaturgical peculiarity that the relegation will now go against Hertha coach Felix Magath, who has had a permanent place in the HSV history books since his days as a player in Hamburg. “It’s about staying with us,” Walter said. That now sounds like a plan that can hardly go wrong.

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