The badly battered Bundesliga club Hertha BSC has apparently reacted to the fall to the bottom of the table and released coach Sandro Schwarz. As the new coach, Hertha veteran Pal Dardai is to lead the crisis-ridden club to staying in the class. This emerges from consistent media reports on Sunday.
The separation from Black took place two days after the bitter 2: 5 (1: 2) in the basement duel at Schalke 04. For Dardai, the record player in Berlin, it will be the third rescue mission on the sidelines of the blue and white: in the seasons In 2014/15 and 2020/21 Dardai had already kept the Berliners in the Bundesliga. The last collaboration ended in November 2021. The 2018/19 season under Dardai was the last that Hertha BSC survived without the coach being fired.
Dardai is deeply rooted with the club not only because of his merits. His son Marton is also in Hertha’s squad. The 21-year-old was in the starting eleven when Schalke went bankrupt.
Black’s end was becoming apparent. The team hadn’t finished their run on Saturday morning when Schwarz had already left the club grounds in his black SUV. Already after the defeat in Gelsenkirchen on Friday evening, the coach had rhetorically prepared for his expulsion. “That’s realistic. I’m responsible,” he said on the DAZN microphone. The fear of the first relegation since 2012 is huge in Berlin. It was “legitimate and the club’s responsibility to think about it,” Schwarz said.
“The coach is the poorest sow when you see this defensive behavior,” says manager Weber after the 2: 5 against Schalke
Hertha is experiencing a highly turbulent season. At the end of January, the club released Managing Director Sport Fredi Bobic. He then filed a lawsuit against his dismissal with the labor court in February. The club has not won six league games in a row, the defensive performance against Schalke 04, who was bottom of the table to date, is a system failure.
Accordingly, arguments for the continued employment of the trainer could hardly be found. Manager Benjamin Weber tried it anyway. “We long for continuity and stability with all the restlessness we have,” said the sporting director. But he also admitted: “The coach is the poorest pig when you see this defensive behavior.” It will be difficult to remain in the class, the debacle at Schalke is “a slap in the face, everyone will write us off now”. Weber emphasized that he did not want to have a “personnel discussion here on site”, but announced: “We will discuss it, that’s perfectly clear.” Schwarz seemed to suspect that the separation would result.
Now it’s up to Dardai, who knows a large part of the team and doesn’t need any time to get used to it. There’s a lot at stake: the crash in the 2nd Bundesliga would set Hertha back a long way. At the same time, it would be the low point of a negative development that has lasted for years, in which unrest determined day-to-day business, trainers were worn out and money was burned. A trend that, ironically enough, started with the separation from Dardai in the summer of 2019.
Dardai and Hertha BSC still have six league games to avert the worst-case scenario. Among other things, the Berliners will receive the two relegation competitors VfB Stuttgart and VfL Bochum. “The team definitely has the quality to stay in class,” said Schwarz. He himself is no longer allowed to work on it.