Arminia Bielefeld’s captain Fabian Klos had to laugh when he talked about his team’s three late aluminum goals shortly after the game: “It’s just Bielefeld, it’s always like that,” he told ins Sky-Microphone. His laugh was by no means due to a tendency towards cynicism, but rather to the first win of the season that the East Westphalia fought for despite a considerable increase in chances at VfB Stuttgart. “We won anyway,” added Klos laconically and summed up: “Everything is good!”
With its 1-0 (1-0) success, Bielefeld ensured Stuttgart’s second defeat in a row – and if you add the cup defeat against Cologne at home, it was even the third Stuttgart bankruptcy in a row. The Swabians are visibly and tangibly in a crisis, but without the industry and location-specific crisis reflexes already taking hold. For example, nobody in Stuttgart questions the coach because everyone can see which players are on the coach’s line-up sheet and, above all, which ones are not. This youth eleven, which was put together under completely different conditions, cannot cope with the loss of 13 professionals, and so this starting lineup, put together according to the principle of creative desperation, seemed far too harmless in the end to punish the Bielefeld team for their three material tests on the VfB housing.
At VfB, the result is a historically crooked lineup
“Arminia is the clearly deserved winner,” said VfB sporting director Sven Mislintat and had no intention of criticizing his players. “We didn’t put the team together out of whim, but out of necessity.” Not only are the irreplaceable offensive players Silas and Sasa Kalajdzic missing, but recently also their talented representatives Chris Führich and Omar Marmoush, and because the goal-scoring defenders Konstantinos Mavropanos and Marc-Oliver Kempf also had to pass, a historically crooked eleven came along out.
The substitute right-back Roberto Massimo, who had just escaped from the corona quarantine, had to play a center-forward, the left-back Borna Sosa moved to the right, and his place on the left was taken over by the young Dane Nikolas Nartey, the substitute six of the substitute six. In this sense, Mislintat accepted the crash into the table basement with the necessary realism. “We are where we saw each other before the season,” he said.
Nobody could blame the Bielefeld team for the fact that they were still happy about the victory against a hardly competitive opponent. Coach Frank Kramer pushed, hugged and patted his players after the final whistle. Probably he was the most relieved because he was able to repay the loyalty advance of his superior Samir Arabi with this win. Kramer diagnosed his team as having an “insane team spirit” and that they were “marching” like “insane”. A lot of psychotic sound came through. “The situation put a lot of strain on the club,” said Captain Klos a few meters away.
Ito’s bottom lifts Okugawa’s offside by centimeters
The general weakness of the Bielefeld finishers is unlikely to be remedied with this victory, seven hits in eleven games are still the weakest result in the league. The fact that the Japanese Masaya Okugawa scored 1-0 in the 19th minute with strong nerves could be attributed to the fact that he must have thought he was offside after a pass from Patrick Wimmer. In order to at least preserve the seemingly small possibility of a regular hit, he finished alone in front of keeper Fabian Bredlow (of course, Stuttgart’s goalkeeper is also the substitute). The video assistant Guido Winkmann then checked meticulously, laid out the calibrated line and virtually dropped the plumb line from the last Stuttgart field player Hiroki Ito (a substitute defender, of course). The technology revealed the bizarre truth: Ito’s bottom lifted Okugawa’s offside by centimeters.
The Bielefeld have now finally developed into the fear of Stuttgart opponents, and VfB failed to score in two duels last season. In Stuttgart they have to gradually prepare to end up with significantly fewer points than hoped for during the Christmas break, in the preliminary round Dortmund, Bayern and Wolfsburg, among others, are still waiting for the disheveled VfB. “The important thing is that we are always slightly above the grain until winter,” said Mislintat, “and the more players are back, the greater the likelihood that we will achieve our goals.”
During the upcoming international break, they will try to get as many players back as possible, Mislintat said, thinking of Kempf, Marmoush and goalkeeper Florian Müller, maybe also of Führich and Mavropanos. And maybe the badly missed Silas will make it back into the squad for the first time at the away game in Dortmund, eight months after his cruciate ligament rupture.