Steffen Baumgart did not want to hide his anger at the injustice that had allegedly happened to his team again. The Cologne coach protested that the opposing goalkeeper was always able to play his best game of the season against them. At least on Friday evening in the encounter between 1. FC Köln and Hertha BSC, Baumgart should not have been wrong with his absolutely serious complaint: Oliver Christensen, 24, held some balls that were actually unstoppable according to the laws of biology and physics . However, Christensen was unable to prevent Cologne from scoring five goals, three goals more than Hertha and about three times as many as they usually score per game.
Pal Dardai, sitting two arm’s lengths away from colleague Baumgart, did not say what he thought about his complaint. It is questionable whether the Berlin coach even bothered to think about it. Dardai had more important things to say about his team’s performance. Namely, among other things, that the bottom of the table Hertha BSC does not maintain a team suitable for the first division. Nothing could be changed about that now. “The team was bought that way, the boys were physically inferior,” he said without any sympathy.
Dardai wasn’t in the mood for slogans, he didn’t want to make speeches himself or hear about the fight to remain in the class. He recommended to his Hertha team: “Don’t say anything, just shut up, go home and think.”
Dardai did not say literally that his team has not lost anything in the Bundesliga. But it sounded similar. That, for example, the coaches shouldn’t talk about attacking with this Hertha squad – “because then the defense doesn’t work right away”. This was probably his mistake before the evening in Cologne, the coach admitted: “Maybe I talked too much about attacking football with the lads.”
Hertha have considerable capacity to threaten their opponents offensively, as Cologne experienced in the first quarter of an hour of the game, when Dodi Lukebakio, Marco Richter, Florian Niederlechner and Stevan Jovetic repeatedly penetrated their ranks. But Hertha is also able to form the cover so effectively that – like two weeks ago – even Bayern Munich despairs of it. The problem according to Dardai: Both at once, defense and attack in a functional balance, the Hertha squad does not give.
In the game there were 31:9 shots on goal for 1. FC Köln
The Berlin coach parried questions about how and why to the 2:5, which was undoubtedly difficult to cope with morally, by triumphantly holding up a piece of paper. This paper contains the statistical data of the game. “You won’t get any further in the Bundesliga with these values,” said Dardai. Most important value: 31:9 shots on goal for 1. FC Köln.
Unfortunately, the amount of Cologne big chances, which – no joke – was between 15 and 20, was not recorded, as well as the number of Hertha players who slipped, stumbled and fell in fundamentally important duels. At times it was done in a way bordering on slapstick, as if someone had tripped her with the remote control. “Defensively too many mistakes, that was the topic today,” said Benjamin Weber, the head of sport.
Jonas Hector and Linton Maina played the good old cat-and-mouse game with right-back Jonjoe Kenny, Lucas Tousart and Marton Dardai never managed to close the center and centre-back Filip Uremovic lost the first serious tackle with Davie Selke twice: Selke made it 1-0 (8th minute) and Uremovic had to leave the field with a headache – the two had hit their heads. Selke also left the game a little later. In that phase, one could still think that Hertha might be serious about the motto “four games, four wins” recently issued by Dardai: Lucas Tousart (18th) and Jovetic (33rd) had meanwhile put the Berliners in the lead. It almost looked like a clever performance.
In the following minutes, the people of Cologne exposed the impression as an optical illusion. The 3:2 just before the break was characteristic of this. Ellyes Skhiri captured the ball in his own penalty area during a Berlin attack, continued to march with it until he had attracted three Hertha players and then sent Stefan Tigges and Linton Maina into the counterattack that was successful in the end. The scene confirmed Dardai’s not too high opinion of the Berlin squad planning: “We can’t keep up with every counterattack, with every sprint over 30 meters.”
Skhiris is not only the most hard-working player in the Bundesliga, he is also one of the smartest
Some people from Cologne, on the other hand, may have become a little wistful at the moment of 3:2. Skhiri’s big performance once again illustrated the dimension of the loss that accompanies his move away in the summer. The Frenchman was the originator and finisher of the counterattack, he had run after his own counterattack. Not only is he the most hard-working player in the Bundesliga (no one runs more than he does), he is also one of the smartest, his game intelligence quotient should be at least 180.
The Berliners didn’t buy a skhiri when they squandered and squandered their investor money until it got them into the unmistakably dire situation they’re in now. The banners in the Hertha fan curve seemed almost ironic: they recommended their club management to vote against a DFL investor – just at a time when only their own investor 777 can save the club from financial collapse.
Meanwhile, the Cologne fans commented on Hertha’s sporting fate by singing a Berlin national anthem: “Hey, that’s going well,” they sang, “Hertha is finally getting down. Get down at last.”