Marco Rose stayed calm in these final minutes, when a dangerous thought probably haunted the minds of many Borussia Mönchengladbach players. In the course of the season so far, the team has suffered from a kind of curse in the final minutes, in which valuable points were lost against VfL Wolfsburg, Union Berlin, Inter Milan and Real Madrid.
Now they were leading 1-0 against RB Leipzig, against the strongest team in the first weeks of the Bundesliga, when the final phase began. A continuation of this little horror series threatened. “Usually I stand on the sidelines and whip the boys again and push them out and scream and do and do,” said the Gladbach coach later. In this very even and mistaken game, however, he “just kept his mouth shut. Maybe that wasn’t so stupid. “
No more goals were scored, Borussia had overturned the league leaders and won their ninth game against RB Leipzig in the Bundesliga for the first time. On a day at the end of which Rose felt as if she had been kissed with happiness.
Sometimes you get “really overdone” from this unpredictable life, at other times it is “Batsch, Batsch, Batsch, and everything is how you want it to be,” he said. Borussia had ended an incredible negative series against RB, before they had always lost in the home stadium. In addition, they had successfully fought against the trauma of the final minutes of the game, beat the league leaders and finally played to zero again. Rose joked that he looked after the “FC fly swatter” that evening, with so many flies that were taken care of in one go. The thickest insect completed represents the story of the 21-year-old professional Hannes Wolf.
The Austrian, who is actually under contract in Leipzig but was loaned to Mönchengladbach in the summer, scored the decisive goal. As the culmination of the most beautiful attack this game had produced (60th). “I had to wait almost a year and a half for a moment like this and I’m glad that the knot burst,” said Wolf, who had a difficult and depressing time behind him. At RB Salzburg, Wolf had scored 16 goals in the league under coach Marco Rose in the two seasons between 2017 and 2019 and prepared eleven more. He was on the direct path to a great career, the move to RB Leipzig was decided and should be the next step. But at the U-21 European Championships in summer 2019, Wolf suffered a broken ankle after a bad foul and had to pause for several months. He only played five times for Leipzig and in summer 2020 he went back on the common path with his mentor Marco Rose.
The two of them already worked together in the U16 at RB Salzburg, together they initially rose to the U19, with which they won the Youth League, the Champions League for junior teams. They then continued to work with the professionals, becoming champions there twice, winning the national cup and moving to the Bundesliga in 2019. Rose to Mönchengladbach, Wolf to Leipzig, where he was highly valued both as a football player and as a person, as RB coach Julian Nagelsmann reported on Saturday. But the injury had robbed him of his ease, the competition was too strong. Wolf was allowed to go and will probably stay in Mönchengladbach permanently. A final transfer would probably have been agreed long ago if the pandemic had not torn such a big hole in Borussia’s budget, but allegedly a certain number of stakes have to be purchased. “I see myself as a player from Borussia Mönchengladbach and hope that I will be here longer than this one year,” said the 21-year-old Wolf on Saturday.
It is still not finally clear whether he is strong enough to take this step towards a Champions League club in one of the most important leagues in the world. He had played well in preparation, but at the start of the season he fell “into a small low”, as he said on Saturday evening. Now he hopes to get to his “top level” soon. But the question of whether he can keep up with people like Marcus Thuram, Lars Stindl, Breel Embolo, Jonas Hofmann, Patrick Herrmann or Alassane Pléa, who was once again outstanding on this day, has not yet been clarified in this brilliant offensive. Even after this game, which Wolf had decided with his clever shot in the far corner, Rose did not fall into boundless enthusiasm: “He played a very decent game,” said the coach rather soberly. It sounded as if he saw clear opportunities for improvement for this footballer, whose strengths are the pressing game and solutions in tight spaces.
But after that evening, the Austrian can at least have hopes for further missions. Because the established attackers have to be spared regularly in view of the great stress of this game year. Wolf is now a real alternative.
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