The 2014-15 season has taken its time to really get going but Junge, Junge, it’s all go now in the final act. You want champions Bayern Munich losing their third league game in a row, 2-1 at 14th-placed Freiburg, and everyone complaining they’re not playing well enough any more? Step this way please, mein Herr.
“Until now, Bayern had been a role model in terms of professionalism, but you don’t see that professionalism in the last few weeks,” said the Wolfsburg sporting director Klaus Allofs on Sunday, in his new role as spokesperson for the silent, oppressed majority. “I’m very disappointed the way they have gifted the points, in parts, or performed below their abilities. I can understand why some clubs are very angry.”
Allofs’ Wolves, currently in second place, are fortunately not affected by the Bavarians downing their tools so shamelessly but the former Werder Bremen general manager was talking from experience, sort of. His side had partied so hard following their 2004 title win at Munich with two games to go that they crashed to a 6-2 home defeat against Leverkusen (who thus made it into the Champions League) and a 3-1 loss at Hansa Rostock. That was 10 years ago though, so it doesn’t count any more. And didn’t Pep Guardiola himself admit that Christian Streich’s Breisgau battlers had “wanted it more”?
They probably did, playing to avoid relegation and all that. As Spiegel Online’s Peter Ahrens succinctly argued, however, teams going through the emotions at the end of the season is an intrinsic part of the league structure and no one should patronise Freiburg – who were only one of two teams to take points off Bayern in the first half of the season in 2013-14 – to the extent that a win for them can only be the product of Bavarian demob-happiness. In fact, they needed to get quite lucky against Bayern’s best XI who dominated throughout and create enough chances for a dull, “Help! Even carefree Bayern are too good for this league” headline-inducing 2-0 win.
Oh, so you fancy a bit of old-school, feelgood stuff instead? Try Borussia Mönchengladbach. From 80s has-beens and relegation strugglers to guaranteed Champions League group stage participants in four short years, without any significant investment and fans/manager/media even once screaming “we want big signings” to the tune of Guantanamera. The Foals have won the race to make it big the Football Manager way, in the manner of years gone by, selling and buying the right players, patiently. And with the right jockey in the saddle in Lucien Favre, of course.
Not far away, Schalke have gone from elevated crisis mode into proper meltdown, despite having just secured Europa League football with a 1-0 win over Paderborn. It’s not that fifth place is being seen as a disgrace by Royal Blues supporters. They just don’t like where the club are going. For 45 minutes, they refused to support the team altogether. Countless banners were held up attacking the club’s leadership (“The fish starts to stink from the head,” one of them read) and their rumoured proposal to incorporate the football club in an identity separate from the multi-sports club Schalke (and its members).
A few hundred fans stayed behind to demand answers outside the VIP area of the Veltins Arena. Supporters feel that S04 could be managed better on and off the pitch, to put it mildly. They also feel that too many players don’t fully identify or even understand the club’s working-class culture. Finally, the idea of a club banner congratulating Zenit St Petersburg before kick-off might have pleased marketing managers from Gazprom, but it failed to “light up the football” as far as S04 loyalists estranged from their club were concerned.
“We have lost the fans’ hearts,” the sporting director Horst Heldt admitted. Still, hearts and minds can be won back. Winning enough points to avoid relegation is a much more difficult task this season. Six teams are still endangered before the last game of the season, which makes this the biggest and – at the same time – tightest bottom of the table ever, and all attempts to get an appropriate double entendre past the Guardian subs completely hopeless. (Shame that there isn’t a blog on Bundesliga 2, really, where Frankfurt have just hired new head coach Thomas Oral to save them from going down.) Anywhere, where were we? Ah yes, the monkey business at the wrong end …
Huub Stevens got his players all worked up by calling them “monkeys” during training this week. In Dutch, it’s a term of endearment, the Stuttgart press officer explained. Suffice to say that his team didn’t slip up on the “potential” skin of an edible fruit produced by several kinds of large herbaceous flowering plants in the genus Musa, in the shape of Hamburg (17th and sinking fast) and went suitably ape – in a good way – when they turned a 1-0 deficit into a hugely important 2-1 win and celebrated by making Cristiano Ronaldo impersonations (I think). The Swabians (16th and looking good) can save themselves with another three points v Paderborn (18th, almost gone), while Hertha (13th) and Hannover (15th) probably deserve to go down but probably won’t.
Tune in for the last of this thoroughly bananas series next week, when – spoiler alert – Guardiola will be drenched in beer and tears will flow for Jürgen Klopp at Dortmund, among other places.
Results: Freiburg 2-1 Bayern, Wolfsburg 2-1 Borussia Dortmund, Schalke 1-0 Paderborn, Stuttgart 2-1 Hamburg, Hertha Berlin 0-0 Frankfurt, Bayer Leverkusen 2-0 Hoffenheim, Augsburg 1-2 Hannover, Mainz 2-0 Köln, Werder Bremen 0-2 Borussia Mönchengladbach.
