A fourth division asks for a press conference before the start of the season and several dozen journalists come. Actually strange, but the person Sandro Wagner is currently attracting a lot of attention. The new coach of the third division game association Unterhaching had recently entertained an audience of millions as a ZDF expert at the European championship with mostly accurate analyzes and loose sayings and thus got an additional boost in popularity. Haching promptly asked for interviews, but the club concentrated the interest in an appointment on Tuesday lunchtime – two days before the regional league opening game this Thursday at TSV Aubstadt.
Sandro Wagner is already well prepared: “I checked out all the videos from Aubstadt on the Internet. I know every player, sometimes even the players’ siblings,” says the coach and this statement fits the basic tenor of his first public lecture in a new role: “I am fully enthusiastic about this task, but I also have enormous respect and a lot of humility.”
The new coach tries to dampen expectations
That is probably the right approach to a thankless task, because Haching can expect a hot dance not only in Aubstadt, but also in many other games in League four: Fully motivated amateur footballers who want to trip the favorite – literally -. Wagner tries to dampen expectations right away, emphasizing that the timetable for the return to league three is designed for 24 months: “If it had meant we have to go straight up this year, otherwise it’s over, I would not have called . “
After all, you have to come together first, many experienced workers have finally left the club. Young talents are moving in, and the few newcomers so far are likely to have two additions after the club announced the signing of Angolan striker José Pierre Vunguidica, 31, most recently 1. FC Saarbrücken, on Tuesday. And then the descent was still fresh and so far hardly processed, as Wagner discovered in the training camp in South Tyrol: “There are still negative thoughts, I have had many individual and group discussions, we have brought everything to the table.”
“It was put in front of our door by the Christ Child,” says President Schwabl of Wagner
In his remarks it becomes clear how much he is dying to start as a first-team coach. He was originally intended for the U19s, before club boss Manfred Schwabl promoted him between their two successful promotion games to the Bundesliga against Schweinfurt (2-0, 2-1). “He was practically put in front of the door by the Christ Child,” says Schwabl, “his heart opens when I see how empathic he is with young people”.
Sandro Wagner does not want to leave Schwabl’s previous requirement that the newcomer should be a “regional Jürgen Klopp”: he wants to go his own way and be compared with other coaches “zero point zero”. As a professional, he had learned something from each of his coaches, “from the good and from the blind”.
And so his game philosophy is already established: “We want to find nice offensive solutions in footballing terms and be disgusting and aggressive against the ball.” Team spirit and mentality are also important, as the European Championship showed impressively. Italy was a “conspiratorial troop”: “That releases an energy that you can neither learn nor teach.”
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