The first leg? For Christian Groß it was like riding a roller coaster – short but extremely jarring. When Werder Bremen met Fortuna Düsseldorf on the second match day after relegation, the veteran was on the bench for 90 minutes and was only substituted on in added time – with the aim of securing the 2-1 lead. But hardly on the pitch, Werder conceded the 2:2. The big bet flopped, it seemed. But then: Penalty, goal for Werder, but still won. “It was,” says Christian Groß in retrospect, “a good, close, exciting game.” And if the 32-year-old’s expectations for the first half of 2022, which begins on Saturday with the second leg and home game against Fortuna starts, then he will make the same judgment in May about the second half of the second division. With an extension of the series of adjectives. Good, tight, exciting and: successful. Which in turn means nothing else than that the Bremen team would ultimately occupy one of the three promotion places.
“In the end, it’s all about that, that’s where we want to go,” explains Groß before the league restarts, joining those colleagues who have shed their reluctance and are no longer talking about reconstruction or other unspecific goals, but about returning in the premier league clearly on the subject. The small series of three victories at the end of last year made us courageous. Even a reserved character like Christian Groß. “I don’t shut myself off from the word,” he says, meaning, of course, the term advancement. But he is not presumptuous enough to suddenly make his own team a hot contender: “There are still a few teams ahead of us, we are chasing. But: it’s our turn. The last three games have shown in which direction things are going. At the end of the day, everyone wants to move up – and we should have those ambitions too.”
Groß is not the only one in the team with this opinion, as a member of the team council he actually speaks on behalf of everyone. The club management with sports director Frank Baumann and trainer Ole Werner, on the other hand, is still reluctant to set specific goals despite the upswing. That will certainly still have to be discussed in the coming days, says Groß and has long since struck a peg: the players want to tackle the promotion again. And nothing else.
“Peu à peu” it should go up in the table, says Groß. A good start to the year against Düsseldorf is absolutely necessary for that: “We had a break, now it’s very important how we get back into the rhythm in the next two games. It’s about picking up speed again immediately and getting back on track.” That’s the way it is after a break.
Whereby: The winter break was special. The canceled training camp, the corona quarantines of the top performers Niclas Füllkrug, Milos Veljkovic and Marco Friedl – none of this helps to describe the starting position as optimal. But it doesn’t matter, explains Christian Groß: “No team is free from these problems. And we made the best of the situation.” But in the end, of course, the number of failures due to corona quarantines could also make the difference in the promotion race. Coach Werner experienced exactly that last season with Holstein Kiel, when the Cases where the decimated team ran out of strength on the home straight and promotion was missed. Groß is hoping for a better ending for Werder in the rest of the season, which could turn into a similar rollercoaster ride as the 3-2 win against Fortuna: “I expect a very tight league in which you can be second with two or three wins , but can also be ninth with two defeats. I don’t think either team will march ahead.”
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