The winter break and a new transfer deadline in the Bundesliga won’t start again for around three months. But this is already an issue at Holstein Kiel. Sports director Carsten Wehlmann was asked after the 2:4 win against Eintracht Frankfurt whether he was already thinking about which new players he would bring in. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the promoted team in the first league is overwhelmed. Even after five match days there is still no win.
But Wehlmann continues to stick to his line and that of the entire club. “Is there a player who can guarantee us anything?” asked the former goalkeeper of FC St. Pauli, HSV and VfB Lübeck. “We trust our guys. They have to learn from their mistakes and correct them. That’s our path.” It’s now about “enduring this frustration and still looking forward positively.”
Kiel with defense problems
But that’s exactly what the people of Kiel are finding increasingly difficult. This was noticeable for the first time after the third defeat in the third Bundesliga home game. “I’m very annoyed,” said Steven Skrzybski, who is one of the few Holstein professionals who already has first division experience from his time at FC Schalke 04. “We can’t concede two or three goals every week. We have to do much better defensively and I don’t just mean the defensive players.”
In almost every phase of a game it is noticeable that the differences in quality between Kiel and established Bundesliga teams such as Frankfurt or Wolfsburg are huge. It is noticeable when promising counterattack situations come to nothing because the ball is not carried cleanly at high speed. It was noticeable when Frankfurt striker Omar Marmoush was able to run towards the goal alone before the score was 0-1 because his opponent had previously slipped past the decisive pass.
Rapp annoyed: “If you concede so many goals…”
From Kiel’s perspective, this statistic is particularly sobering: the second-best defense of the last second division season conceded an average of 3.4 goals per game one level higher. And if you blamed that after the 6-1 defeat against Bayern Munich solely on the sheer force of this well-known opponent, it no longer worked that way after the game against Frankfurt.
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“I don’t want to say alarm signal. But of course the fact is: if you concede so many goals, it will be difficult to win a game,” said coach Marcel Rapp. And he emphasized: “How do the goals fall? Is there a pattern there? We’re analyzing it.”
New arrivals from the third and fourth leagues
Before the season, Holstein was unable to catch up with other teams on the transfer market. Half of the new additions came to replace two lost top performers (Tom Rothe and Philipp Sander). The other half came from the third or fourth division.
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