A look at the history books helps to understand the dimensions of the sporting imbalance at Bundesliga soccer team VfL Wolfsburg. And to find a balance sheet like the current one, you have to turn the pages for a long time. The last five competitive defeats in a row for Wolfsburg were in spring 2004, the opponents were Leverkusen (2-4), Bremen (0-2), Rostock (1-3), Stuttgart (1-5) and Hertha ( 0: 1). If you want to find more than five VfL bankruptcies in a row, you have to look back a good 44 (!) Years – in 1977 the opponents in the 2nd North League were Göttingen, Solingen and Herford, among others. The fact that VfL have to make their home game against 1. FC Köln (8.30 p.m.) on Tuesday evening to prevent a negative record is of secondary importance. Because in the game against the Domstadters, the main thing is that the relegation battle in Wolfsburg does not begin shortly before Christmas.
display
–
“That must be the moment when you take the knife between your teeth and say: We’ll fight that now! We should get into this mood as soon as possible. Go ahead, do it – and tackle it, “said VfL coach Florian Kohfeldt the day before the game once again fiercely. The threat of a sixth defeat in a row for the first time since the beginning of the new era of professional football in Wolfsburg is only a statistical secondary theater of war. It works It is about stopping the negative spiral – in terms of results as well as performance. According to Kohfeldt, “first the head and then the feet” are required.
–
The team “invested a lot” in the 2-0 draw against Stuttgart on Saturday, but “the feeling of leaving the field as a winner did not arise”. His approach for the penultimate first round game: “We have to accept that it is a phase that is not optimal at the moment. And we have to face it – and not just hope that it will pass. Courage and consistency are very important here – and the right way to deal with situations that are not so exciting. “
–
The five consecutive defeats in 2004 were “not so exciting”, especially not for Jürgen Röber, the VfL coach was replaced by Erik Gerets between bankruptcy number 4 and bankruptcy number 5. Which now has the unpleasant side effect for Kohfeldt that he was the first Wolfsburg Bundesliga coach to sit on the bench in five consecutive lost competitive games. Manager Jörg Schmadtke and sports director Marcel Schäfer had already slowed down the supposed automatism of the coaching discussion that followed at the weekend with clear words.
In terms of sport, it is still far from being as bad as it was in 1977, when VfL got lost in what was then the 2nd Northern League for the second time. Manfred Mattes, ex-VfL youth coach and still a member of the VfL Academy today, was a player at the time. “We were happy when we were allowed to quit work at VW at 3 p.m. so that we could go to training – and then we played against teams that worked under professional conditions,” he recalls. A structural lack of chances, which was especially visible at the end of the season, when VfL lost twelve (!) Games in a row, but stuck to coach Radoslav Momirski – the Serb had taken over from Paul Kitzmann after the first half of the season.
–
At the end of the 1976/77 season, VfL had to go back down to the 3rd division – the last relegation of a first VfL soccer team to this day. That was not considered a disaster at the time, because the squad was considered barely competitive even before the season started. 44 years later it is completely different – VfL has a team that finished fourth in the preseason, did not lose a regular player and has triggered corresponding claims. “We shouldn’t make the mistake of saying: This is the same team as last year, everything can be easily reproduced,” says Kohfeldt. “Because you have to work everything anew.”
Because there was hardly any time for this up to now, the following applies: Close your eyes and somehow through. First against Cologne, then on Friday at Bayern, then into the winter break, at the end of which Kohfeldt at least can do a few days of training on December 29th. What comes out of it is certainly more informative than comparisons with series of defeats 17 or 44 years ago.
–
