After the miserable start to the Super League, the Bernese have to expand their vocabulary to include the term basement duel. YB coach Patrick Rahmen has no presents to give out on his return to Winterthur.
Returning to Winterthur and desperately needing a win: Patrick Rahmen, the coach of Young Boys.
Peter Klaunzer / Keystone
In fact, the term had been banned from the vocabulary in Bern many years ago. But late on Tuesday evening, after the 3-0 defeat against Aston Villa in the Champions League, a reporter brought it back into play. That might sound strange, he said, but now the Super League is facing a “bottom of the table” team this weekend, namely Winterthur.
During the week, Champions League, stars everywhere in the Wankdorf, plus a guest from the Premier League, the richest league in the world. And at the weekend, as strange as it may sound: basement duel, on the Schützenwiese, against FC Winterthur. In the YB universe, there are two planets in the 2024/25 season, and so far it seems as if they are being visited by two completely different expeditions.
In the championship, the champions are the only team in the league still waiting for a win after six games. The Bernese have only picked up three points and are in last place. They have never started a Super League season so badly.
Directly ahead of Young Boys is Winterthur, the underdog who, like ninth-placed Grasshoppers, has only picked up four points. And now Winterthur and GC are YB’s next opponents in the championship.
The Young Boys are therefore facing not just one but two basement duels. These will be crucial games for them, games that they have to win; they have no other choice. The season is still young, but they are already ten points behind leaders Lugano.
The Bern mortgage is unlikely to increase
Paying off such a mortgage will be a complicated task either way. It should therefore not be any bigger. Especially since the Champions League brings fame, honor and money, but the new format also means eight additional games instead of the previous six, which will represent an enormous burden for YB until January.
When the conversation turned to next weekend, the bottom-of-the-table clash against Winterthur, on Tuesday evening, YB coach Patrick Rahmen only said a few words about it. But they gave us some deep insights.
Rahmen promised “full focus” on the Winterthur game. He said that everyone should feel “that we absolutely want to win the game.” At first, that sounded like the kind of phrase football coaches like to use. But it illustrated what the Bernese have sometimes lacked on Swiss football pitches this season. It was the basic things, namely: concentration. The will to win.
Foreign countries, however, have been a strength for the Young Boys this season. They did so in impressive fashion when they beat Galatasaray Istanbul in the Champions League playoffs. When the Bernese expedition returned to the Swiss pitches, it had little in common with their international performances: 1:1 against Lausanne, then a hard-fought 4:2 in Vevey in the cup, including a surrender of a two-goal lead.
On Tuesday against Aston Villa, YB started strongly. They were full of determination, full of courage and full of concentration. But it only took one mistake for all their confidence to collapse. After a corner, the Bernese didn’t even give Youri Tielemans a pass – 0:1.
Fragility and lack of leadership
A few minutes later, a YB defender came up with the idea of playing a back pass in his own penalty area and under great pressure – 0:2. The mistake was made by Mohamed Ali Camara, the head of defense. The scene highlighted one of Bern’s problems: there is a lack of leaders. And those who have this status also make such mistakes.
After the match against Aston Villa, the Bernese praised themselves for their strong start, but in the end a different impression remained: that the Young Boys have also become more fragile in international business. A match that they should have rightly lost, they lost in a way that they really shouldn’t have lost.
And now Winterthur. The game is particularly important for Patrick Rahmen. Last season he was the boss at the Schützenwiese and recommended himself for the most coveted coaching position in the country, the one in Bern.
In Winterthur, Rahmen was applauded as he bid farewell. Now he is returning to YB as coach, whose team has already been booed this season. He will meet his successor Ognjen Zaric, who was previously his assistant in Winterthur. On Friday, Rahmen said that this return was a “special moment” for him, also because Winterthur had allowed him to move to Bern.
But there is no room for sentimentality on Sunday. Rahmen needs the win, and for that he needs YB from the planet of Champions League qualification. He believes that there is only one YB. And that this one YB in Switzerland was not as bad as the result suggests. He says that you have to look at the individual games, see the “big picture”. But he also knows that in the end only one thing counts: the table.
