Afterwards, when the Hertha BSC players were back in the Böllenfalltor’s ramshackle away team changing room (think cracked tiles, wooden benches, drizzly showers, in other words: a Saw film set), there was only one thing to do: party. “It escalated a bit,” quickly, in the words of left-back Marvin Plattenhardt, as he and his team-mates danced and shouted on Saturday afternoon. Hertha had won 4-0 at the rustic, deliberately unrefined home of SV Darmstadt 98, where Dieter Schuster’s recently promoted fight club had taken great care to ruin the bumpy pitch altogether by training on it the night before.
The boys from Berlin were not to be denied, however. Vedad Ibisevic put the ball in the net at the first opportunity, after only 12 minutes, Plattenhardt made it two with a fine free-kick (26’) and it was all over when Ibisevic headed in Hertha’s third shortly after the break. Salomon Kalou’s goal to make it 4-0 (77’), a strong solo effort, made the scoreline more emphatic and underlined the side’s wondrous achievement. Only Bayern Munich had beaten the hardy Lillies that convincingly on their own patch (3-0), only Bayern and Borussia Dortmund are now ahead of Pal Dardai’s men in the table 10 days before Christmas. It may still sound a bit daft, but it’s true, nonetheless: “Hertha, Faster, Better, Stronger” has been the unlikely theme tune of the first half of 2015-16, at least as far as the field below the Bundesliga’s superbly consistent two at the top is concerned.
BSC were last seen doing this well under Lucien Favre, in 2008-09. They finished fourth that season, narrowly missing out on the Champions League (Germany only had three spots in the competition at the time), then dropped like a stone and down a division 12 months later. Only a few months ago, lest we forget, they were lucky to escape relegation, too, on account of Freiburg losing the last game of the season. To see them now outdo bona fide Champions League teams such as Leverkusen, Wolfsburg, Gladbach and Schalke 04, verges on the miraculous, as the team is largely unchanged and not exactly brimming with individual class.
Dardai, the former club icon responsible for the bewildering upturn since taking over the reigns at the leading club in the German capital in February, insists that earthly toils, not heavenly help have lifted Hertha to heights of fancy, however. “If you watch us train regularly, you don’t have to talk about miracles but hard work,” said the 39-year-old, who has also helped Hungary reach their first major tournament since 1986 as their national team manager (until July), “we haven’t had to rely on luck until now.” Instead, they have relied on efficiency, just as they did when Favre took them to a great run built on a series of 1-0 wins seven years ago. Five goalscoring opportunities were enough to score four times in Darmstadt. Most games have followed a similar pattern. Local broadsheet Tagesspiegel crunched the numbers to find that no Bundesliga team has needed fewer shots for each of their goals this year. “It’s very hard to be that efficient but it helps greatly and is a sign of strong confidence,” said the sporting director, Michael Preetz, a former Hertha striker.
The goals have come at opportune moments too. Ten times, Hertha were first to open the scoring, and in all but one of these matches, they’ve gone on to win. Such impressive figures cannot be achieved without a degree of good fortune. To do so much with quite little is a trick that might work for the Helene Fischers of this world indefinitely but in football, it’s impossible to pull that off forever, as the odds catch up with you eventually. But Hertha have good grounds to feel hopeful nevertheless. Their attacking game has improved immeasurably since the catenaccio of Dardai’s early weeks. “We are the same team as last year but fellow managers all say that we are capable of playing some very good technical stuff now,” said Dardai proudly.
Hertha might not create that many chances, but they tend to be decent ones. Preetz, one the league’s lesser feted football heads, has also had a hand in Hertha’s transformation. The 48-year-old instructed his lawyers to formally deny a Tagesspiegel article from March that had claimed he “lied awake at night, worrying about blame and fate” but has thankfully shown much better judgment in the transfer market. Winger Mitchell Weiser (Bayern), striker Ibisevic (Stuttgart) and especially midfielder Vladimir Derida (Freiburg) have proved instant hits at the Olympic stadium, adding more of the quality that Kalou alone had been providing before.
Furthermore, Hertha consider themselves one of the fittest teams in the league after enduring a gruelling but productive pre-season the intensity of which had not been experienced by most squad members before. At the back, they’ve been immovable, in sharp contrast to the completion date of the city’s ill-fated BER airport, some might say, and up front, they’ve been clinical enough to keep more talented teams at bay. Ibisevic warned of the “dangers of the current phase” on Saturday; one had to “invest even more to ensure staying up there as long as possible,” said the 31-year-old. The Bosnian striker has only been in the service of the “Old Lady” for a few months, but long enough apparently, to understand that Berlin, as a football city, loves to career from benign ignorance to full-blown hysteria at the merest hint of any success. Thus, Hertha finding themselves in a much brighter place than anticipated during the winter break could well be a bit disorientating and fraught with pitfalls.
Too often, club and supporters have allowed themselves to get carried away in similar circumstances in the past. The hard-nosed Dardai, though, who succeeded through effort and grit, not artistry, as a player, should be able to prevent an outbreak of premature delusions of grandeur. For the moment, Hertha are too busy running to lose the ground below their feet, in any case. They’re in action again this Wednesday, away to second division 1. FC Nürnberg in the last 16 of the DFB Pokal. Since the final of that competition was moved to the Olympic stadium in 1985, Hertha have never made it as far. A shot at silverware “at home” has proved an unattainable desire but with Dardai in charge, nothing seems quite impossible right now. A win against the Franconians, followed by another one in the league, at home against FSV Mainz, would, for a start, legitimately allow them to do what they do best in Berlin, apart from partying of course: to dream big, again.
Results: Mainz 0-0 Stuttgart, Wolfsburg 1-1 Hamburg, Leverkusen 5-0 Gladbach, Bremen 1-1 Köln, Darmstadt 0-4 Hertha, Hoffenheim 1-0 Hannover, Bayern 2-0 Ingolstadt, Schalke 2-1 Augsburg, Dortmund 4-1 Frankfurt.
