Whoever VfL Bochum is currently playing against under its new coach, Thomas Letsch keeps meeting up with old acquaintances from his past at RB Salzburg. A week ago in Leipzig it was coach Marco Rose, on Saturday against Eintracht Frankfurt it was coach Oliver Glasner, with whom Letsch was also an assistant coach in Salzburg under Roger Schmidt. RB football follows the Swabian Letsch everywhere, only on Castroper Straße in Bochum, where he doesn’t meet anyone from this cosmos of modern football. Because in Bochum, they like to say proudly, they play Castrop street football, and that is defined more by a down-to-earth mentality than by a state-of-the-art strategy that is expensive to staff.
A week ago in Leipzig, Letsch missed an RB corset on his debut for VfL: a back three and the requirement to press high and switch quickly after winning the ball. This is the principle of the football that Letsch learned in Salzburg, that he had played at Vitesse Arnhem until two weeks ago and that he actually envisioned playing at VfL Bochum. But that didn’t work out at all, this corset was too tight for the Bochum team. They lost 4-0 and for the home game against Frankfurt Letsch realized that he prefers to let his players play in their usual 4-3-3 and no longer demands the very running-intensive pressing.
Basically, he let them play like they did very successfully last season under coach Thomas Reis. Lo and behold: it worked. Bochum celebrated their first win in the ninth game of the season with a surprisingly clear 3-0 (0-0) against Champions League participants Frankfurt, who recently defeated Olympique Marseille and Bundesliga leaders Union Berlin and wrested a respectable 0-0 from Tottenham Hotspur would have.
“In the end, it’s just a matter of hitting everything,” says goalscorer Förster
RB football or VfL football, pressing or possession, avant-garde or Castrop street football? “In the end,” said Bochum’s match winner Philipp Förster after his two assists and the 3-0 win, “in the end it’s all about hitting everything, and Thomas Letsch made it clear to us that it only works together.”
Doubts were growing in Bochum that it could still work somehow, because VfL had not scored a single point in the first six games of the new season. The path of this team seemed to lead straight into league two after the loss of their most important and apparently not equally replaced players, and the 0:4 in Leipzig also the change of coach from Reis to Letsch already fizzled out.
Against meager Frankfurters, who without Sebastian Rode, Daichi Kamada and Ansgar Knauff in the starting XI, perhaps thought they could take the game a little more calmly between two European Cup hits, the Bochum team, on the other hand, recalled the best games of the past with their passion and their fighting spirit Season. At that time they had even humiliated Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich under Thomas Reis. “We ate grass,” said midfielder Förster, an addition from VfB Stuttgart, who was probably only in the starting XI against Frankfurt because Kevin Stöger was out with a corona infection.
How suitable VfL is for the Bundesliga, he now has to prove against Stuttgart and Union
Up to the 70th minute, Bochum only made an enormous effort, but still made many individual mistakes and were also unsuccessful in the end. But from the 70th minute everything suddenly worked out. First, Philipp Hofmann headed the ball to make it 1-0 (71′) after a Förster corner, then Frankfurt’s Evan Ndicka steered the ball into his own goal after a Förster free-kick to make it 0-2 (87′) and finally Förster smashed the ball in the 91st minute .minute to the 3:0 final score in the angle.
Coach Letsch was impressed by the performance of his team, and he himself played a key role in the triumph because he didn’t insist on his idea of football, but instead made systemic concessions to the team. However, he himself did not want to set the system question too high. After the defeat in Leipzig, people thought about it and decided that this 4-3-3 “should be the basic order for the time being”; and they want to see in the next few weeks “which system suits us best”. But basically he thinks: “It’s not about systems, but about belief, about compactness and about duels.”
“VfL is back,” the fans chanted after the game, but it’s too early to say. The contact with the lower middle of the table has been restored to some extent, but VfL Bochum has yet to prove that it is really suitable for the Bundesliga this season in the next games in Stuttgart, against Union Berlin and in Wolfsburg.