Otto Rehhagel, the older ones will remember, had a soft spot for smart players as a coach. An anecdote that the now 85-year-old football sage still tells today is about the short-term retraining of striker Marco Bode as a left-back due to a personnel emergency. He asked the player whether he knew, “Mr. Bode, why you played left-back?”, but he didn’t know. Rehhagel said: “Because you have a high school diploma and therefore understand how to change much more quickly.”
Now, even during Rehhagel’s long Werder era, not all of his players were flash bulbs like Bode, who passed his free time with chess and literature, but a bit of brains never hurt anyone in football. This was true of Rehhagel in the 1980s and is no different today.
And with that, welcome to the presence of Werder Bremen, in which it is difficult to imagine current coach Ole Werner discussing with “Mr. Friedl” what grades he had at school, but Mr. Friedl has already talked about it, how clever his team was against TSG Hoffenheim on Saturday evening. Spoiler: not necessarily super smart. The game was lost 2:3 – but how…
As captain of SV Werder, Friedl is something like the foreman on a traveling construction site, known as “Defense” on the Weser. He was missing there recently and has now returned, but Amos Pieper was now missing. Niklas Stark has been missing for a long time, and then left-back Oliver Deman got sick, and Anthony Jung replaced him in the team. There’s always something broken somewhere in Bremen, you could keep half a senior year busy with the changes. Result: 17 goals conceded in seven games, eight of them against promoted teams Heidenheim and Darmstadt. Even during these devastating defeats, one or two Bremen players were of the opinion that they obviously hadn’t been very clever when defending. Marvin Ducksch, for example, found his most recent appearance in Darmstadt “bottomless” (2:4).
In Bremen, people have a keen sense of when their club has reached a point where it could use a warm embrace from their city. In recent years, this has mostly happened in the final phase of a season, lavish receptions for the team bus in front of the stadium, posters on bridges and underpasses in the streets, blankets of flags on all balconies or an away trip to Berlin by 25,000 Bremen residents: If it’s against the Ab – or it’s about promotion, they are there, the fans. The fact that even before the seventh match day there was an unusual fan march through the district, the Bremen district near the stadium where games are discussed before and after the game with the help of the wide range of catering options, is evidence of an underlying mood of concern early on in this season. No team in the Bundesliga was worse across all seasons in the 2023 calendar year. It’s time for something to change.
There is an underlying mood of concern in sensitive Bremen
Naby Keïta should be responsible for making things happen as soon as possible. The surprise transfer of the summer is something like SV Werder’s Harry Kane, a real improver with Premier League experience – if he can play. When Harry Kane traveled to the Weser with Bayern for the first game of the season, journalists from the island also came along to watch Kane. They were then amused to see Keïta against the Munich team just like he had in the past five years at Liverpool FC: They already have him there not see play. This probably falls under the category of British humor.
Keïta was injured a lot and for a long time, and he actually started his time in Bremen with a torn muscle in his thigh. In the appendix’s imagination, this is actually supposed to build on those Werder episodes when iconic players like Micoud, Diego, Özil and De Bruyne enchanted the Weserstadion. Yes, really, THE De Bruyne!
Against Hoffenheim, Keïta was finally in the starting line-up for the first time, but it didn’t make anything better. There are still phases in the Bremen game in which the team, in a kind of collective phantom pain, hits long balls forward to where the transfer window is creakingly closing a There was a gap, but where now? one gap is. “Gap” is what people call striker Niclas Füllkrug, who has moved to Dortmund, a so-called target or wall player for, for example, balls hit long forward. Bremen lost in the first half against Hoffenheim, from which they escaped with a 1 thanks to goals from Maximilian Beier (0:1, 8th minute), Romano Schmid (1:1, 17th minute) and Grischa Prömel (29th minute). :2 deficit, a whopping two thirds of their aerial duels went, and on offense it felt like it was even more like five quarters. The game, so to speak, went past Keïta. After almost an hour he was replaced, the thigh, and you can already guess: Keïta remains a promise for the time being.
TSG, who had been superior until then, had failed to decide the game and, despite great opportunities from Kevin Vogt and Florian Grillitsch, they did not do so afterwards. In addition, clouds of drizzle now wafted under the flaming floodlight masts into the Weser Stadium, creating a touch of that special North German magic in which everything suddenly seems possible. So Werder, now flat and fast instead of wide and high, was able to fight their way back into this game – and the game itself approached its punch line, injury time.
Werder’s efforts led to Jens Stage’s equalizer in the first minute of stoppage time, as coach Werner found the reward for a “very, very good second half”. Werner, the football teacher, talks a lot and often about the development and learning processes of his team, which is actually not that young anymore. Last season, Bremen often amazed their opponents by learning so much during a game to win it in stoppage time. Late to the party, but then right: Stage’s determined equalizer at the final whistle was reminiscent of Bremen last season, when the promotion euphoria carried Werder through the first half of the season like a magic carpet.
And with that – finally – back to Mr. Friedl, Marco Friedl, the captain. “Stupid, just stupid” was what happened around 80 seconds after the 2-2 draw, said the captain. In later interviews he differentiated somewhat: they had behaved “too stupidly” in the crucial moments. Stupid, stupid, stupid, it doesn’t matter: a simple throw-in, which was extended from Bremen’s Jung to Hoffenheim’s Marius Bülter, was enough for the guests to win the game. For TSG coach Pellegrino Matarazzo, the goal was an expression of the club’s “new mindset”, which simply didn’t want to play against relegation again. In the past, around Otto Rehhagel’s time, people might have simply called it “luck”.
For Werder coach Werner, however, the goal was another reason to “learn from it and correct mistakes.” Maybe he’ll have his defensive players’ school certificates come to him during the international break for the next defensive line.