As if that wasn’t enough of an honor, the discussion then turned to his achievements for SC Union Nettetal in the Oberliga Niederrhein. Granit Xhaka, the midfielder for champions and cup winners Bayer Leverkusen, worked on his coaching license last season at the amateur club from the city near his home in Düsseldorf. Now he was sitting on the podium in Cologne because he had been named player of the day as captain of Switzerland after the 3-1 opening victory against Hungary, and he reported that coaching helped him “perhaps to see the game differently, to read it differently.”
Xhaka, 31, is having the best year of his life as a footballer, and according to his first impressions at the European Championships, things will continue like this for now. After a convincing victory, Switzerland is now the German national team’s fiercest rival for group victory. And with his passes – he played against Hungary in 1999 – Xhaka is the DFB’s equivalent of Toni Kroos. Swiss defender Silvan Widmer, captain of Mainz 05, hardly objected to the comparison: Both are “two incredible players” with “great charisma” and “ball control” that is unparalleled.
As well-known as Xhaka’s qualities are, it was surprising how convincingly they were also put to use in the national team. And that had to do not only with him, but also with the other main players in the opening match from a Swiss perspective: striker Kwadwo Duah and midfielder Michel Aebischer, who scored the 1-0 and 2-0 goals, as well as coach Murat Yakin, who surprisingly selected the two.
Few coaches at this European Championship have been as controversial in recent times as former Bundesliga professional Yakin in Switzerland, and like everything in the so-called national team, this also had to do with record international player Xhaka, who publicly criticized the coach last autumn. The midfielder himself recalled this time. In 13 years as a national player, he had “never experienced such a negative phase” as the European Championship qualification, which Switzerland only managed with difficulty. But the team emerged stronger from it, training was now more intensive, the competition was greater. And Yakin also received praise from the captain: the line-up, the tactics, “very clever of the coach.”
Xhaka expresses great praise for coach Yakin
Unlike in the previous test matches, Dan Ndoye did not play as a left full-back, but as a right winger. Midfielder Aebischer played on the left back, but by no means stuck strictly to the wing, but mostly moved into the center, where the Hungarians were not expecting him and where he therefore always had space to develop. And a block of players from FC Bologna formed around Xhaka: Aebischer, 27, plays there, as do Remo Freuler, 32, and Ndoye, 23.
Bologna may not be quite the equivalent of the unbeaten Leverkusen in the Bundesliga, but the club managed to qualify for the Champions League for the first time in its history, and did so with a style of football that, with its many short passes, is reminiscent of that of Leverkusen or VfB Stuttgart. Coach Thiago Motta was poached from Juventus Turin.
Switzerland also played pass after pass, especially in the early stages against Hungary. The statisticians counted exactly 21 of them in a row, until Aebischer, with the most demanding and 22nd pass through four Hungarian defenders, found Duah in the twelfth minute, the surprise candidate for the solution to Switzerland’s biggest problem up to that point: who was actually going to score the goals?
Duah, 27, played for 1. FC Nuremberg for a year until last summer, won the Bulgarian championship with Ludogorets Razgrad last season – and played his second international match on Saturday. “I’m grateful to be here. Grateful to be in the starting eleven. I’m grateful for the goal I was able to score,” he said.
His nomination for the European Championship squad had already caused astonishment and was mainly due to the fact that regular centre-forward Breel Embolo, 27, is struggling with injury problems. But the former Schalke and Gladbach player, now at AS Monaco, also came on when the game was once again on the brink in the final phase – and scored to make it 3-1 in stoppage time. Aebischer had scored the 2-0 shortly before half-time with a curling shot from the edge of the penalty area into the corner, but Hungary reduced the deficit to 1-2 in the 66th minute. And so Embolo was needed as a powerful attacker to keep the ball in the opponent’s half. His goal, a lob over goalkeeper Peter Gulacsi in front of the loud and numerous Swiss fans in the Cologne south stand, made his return to the national team perfect. It was his first game for Switzerland after a cruciate ligament tear and since December 2022.
Coach Yakin spoke about all of this in the press conference with great satisfaction, which he did not even make a secret of. He even told a story that enriched his decisions with a suitable analogy. No, he replied to a corresponding question, he is not a poker player, you never know “what your opponent has in his hand”. He prefers to play chess because he can control the pieces. On the train ride from the team headquarters in Stuttgart to Cologne he won two games. And then, according to his story, he also made the right moves on match day.