Whoever is playing against VfL Bochum under the guidance of their new manager, Thomas Letsch, continues to meet old acquaintances from his past at RB Salzburg. A week ago in Leipzig there was the coach Marco Rose, on Saturday against Eintracht Frankfurt there was the coach Oliver Glasner, with whom Letsch was also assistant coach in Salzburg under Roger Schmidt. RB football follows 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 proudly say, they play Castrop street football, and this is defined more by a down-to-earth mentality than a cutting-edge strategy that is costly to staff.
A week ago in Leipzig, Letsch skipped an RB corset on his VfL debut: a three back and a requirement to press high and change quickly after winning the ball. This is the principle of football that Letsch learned in Salzburg, which he had played at Vitesse Arnhem until two weeks ago and which he had actually imagined playing at VfL Bochum. But it didn’t work at all, this corset was too tight for the Bochum team. They lost 4-0 and for the home game against Frankfurt Letsch he understood that he prefers to have his players play in the usual 4-3-3 and no longer requires very intense pressing.
Basically, he let them play as they successfully did last season under the guidance of manager Thomas Reis. Lo and behold: it worked. Bochum celebrated their first win in the ninth game of the season with an astonishing 3-0 (0-0) against Champions League participants Frankfurt, who recently defeated Olympique Marseille and Bundesliga leaders Union Berlin and snatched a respectable 0-0 at Tottenham Hotspur would have.
“In the end, it’s just about hitting everything,” says goal scorer Förster
RB football or VfL football, pressing or possession, vanguard or street football Castrop? “In the end,” said Philipp Förster, winner of the Bochum match after his two assists and a 3-0 win, “in the end it’s about hitting everything and Thomas Letsch made it clear that it only works together.”
In Bochum doubts were growing that it could still work somehow, because VfL hadn’t scored a single point in the first six games of the new season. This team’s path seemed to lead straight into the league after the loss of their most important and apparently not equally substituted players, and the 0: 4 in Leipzig even the change of coach from Reis to Letsch has already faded.
Against the skinny Frankfurters, who without Sebastian Rode, Daichi Kamada and Ansgar Knauff in the starting eleven, perhaps thought they could take a little more calm in the game between two European Cup successes, the Bochum team, on the other hand, recalled the best matches 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 weed,” said midfielder Förster, a VfB Stuttgart addition, who was probably only in the starting XI against Frankfurt because Kevin Stöger was out with a crown infection.
How well suited VfL is for the Bundesliga, now they have to prove themselves against Stuttgart and Union
Up to the 70th minute Bochum only made a huge effort, but still made many individual mistakes and in the end they were not successful. But from the 70th minute everything suddenly worked. First Philipp Hofmann headed the 1-0 (71 ‘) from Förster’s corner (71’), then Frankfurt’s Evan Ndicka directed the ball into his own goal after a 0-2 free-kick by Förster (87 ‘ ) and finally Förster smashed the ball in the 91st minute for the final score of 3: 0 in the corner.
Manager Letsch was impressed with his team’s performance, and he himself played a key role in the triumph because he didn’t insist on his idea of football but instead made systematic concessions to the team. However, he himself did not want to set the system demand too high. After the defeat in Leipzig, people thought about it and decided that this 4-3-3 “should be the basic order for now”; and they want to see in the coming weeks “which system suits us best”. But basically he thinks: “It is not a question of systems, but of convictions, compactness and duels”.
“VfL is back”, fans sang after the game, but it’s too early to tell. Contact with the lower-middle tier has been restored somewhat, but VfL Bochum have yet to prove that they are really fit for the Bundesliga this season in their upcoming matches in Stuttgart, against Union Berlin and Wolfsburg.
