Dhe VfL Bochum has experienced a bitter return to the Bundesliga after eleven years of being second class. After an early red card, the promoted team lost 1-0 (0-1) at VfL Wolfsburg on Saturday. Wout Weghorst gave the new “Wölfe” coach Mark van Bommel a successful debut as a Bundesliga coach with his goal in the 22nd minute. After Robert Tesche from Bochum was sent off (4th) and a hand penalty missed by the Dutchman (5th), he could have been even higher.
Although the Champions League participant fell sharply in the last half hour, this success and the return of 8,536 spectators to the Volkswagen Arena gave the Wolfsburg team a better result after their mistake in the DFB Cup and their series of defeats during the preparation for the season Feeling.
The Bochumers, on the other hand, got a feeling for how big the quality and speed differences between the first and second league are before all the fans had sat down. After 52 seconds, U21 European champion Ridle Baku shot the ball against the crossbar. After the following corner, the misfortune broke in on the promoted team.
Because Tesche extended a header from Renato Steffen with his arm on the post. Referee Frank Willenborg initially wanted to continue playing, but then received a signal from his video assistant. The decision after studying the moving images: hand penalty for Wolfsburg and the red card for the 34-year-old veteran because he illegally prevented a goal for the opponent. The fact that goalkeeper Manuel Riemann parried Weghorst’s weak penalty shot only gave Bochumers a brief sense of achievement. Because from then on they were only occupied with defending. And only went well for a quarter of an hour.
Wolfsburg was oppressively thinking for at least an hour and played patiently and variably. The missed penalty did not make the favorite nervous. The work of the former Bayern captain van Bommel was not only due to the fatal mistake during the cup game in Münster. One of the difficulties in his first few weeks at VfL was that the 44-year-old Dutchman would like to add the components of ball possession and short passing to his predecessor Oliver Glasner’s robust counter-football, and with this change, he was visibly alienating his players.
Against an opponent like Bochum, who was forced to entrench themselves with nine players in and around their own penalty area, the elements of Van Bommel football did VfL very well for a long time. The poor exploitation of chances and a loss of strength and concentration after an hour became more and more of a nuisance for the new coach.
Initially, Weghorst (46th / 55th), Jerome Roussillon (48th) and Baku (52nd) gave several more opportunities to make everything clear. After that, the Wolfsburg lost their line and some spectators more and more patience. But the Bochumers were too harmless to be able to take advantage of that. Milos Pantovic missed the only good counter chance in the 77th minute.
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