SThey had been working on a sequel that, after four victories in qualifying, promised another brilliant chapter for the German U-21 national team, which has been consistently successful for years. On Friday, however, the next generation of the German European champions of this year got lost in the fog of Großaspach and was almost defeated in a duel with their Polish classmates after just twenty minutes.
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The 0: 3 deficit after the goals of Benedyczak (5th / 12th) and Skoras (15th) and the red card for the German defender Mbom (19th) signaled abundantly that the defending champion, who then bravely fought for damage limitation, was out of this unequal game against an impressively effective opponent could at best take away a few comforting aspects. The 0: 4 by Kozlowski shortly before the end (90th) was an exclamation mark behind a dark evening from a German point of view.
“If you don’t have access, you have to at least see that you secure the depth,” said head coach Antonio Di Salvo, criticizing the naive defensive work, coupled with careless mistakes and fatal ball losses further up front. At least his team showed “good morals” and “got everything out from the 15th to the 80th minute”. The Germans still lead the table in qualification group B, ahead of the Israelis with the same number of points and the Poles, who have moved up to two points.
“Enormously strong form fluctuations”
A snapshot halfway through the games, which Hermann Gerland, Di Salvo’s most prominent assistant, sums up with the realization that “it has become more exciting”. The Westphalian original coach, an institution at FC Bayern Munich for almost 25 years, accepted the offer from the German Football Association (DFB) to work in the team of the successor to successful coach Stefan Kuntz without hesitation.
“I just enjoy teaching young people something,” he says of his long time as a coach of the Bayern amateurs, head of the Munich youth training center and co-trainer of luminaries such as Louis van Gaal, Jupp Heynckes, Pep Guardiola and Carlo Ancelotti and Hansi Flick, who brought him to the DFB as the new national coach.
“I owe so much to football that I don’t want to just throw away my knowledge,” he said the day after the German U21s lost for 14 months. Fighter Gerland, whom they call “Tiger”, knows the unstable shape curves of aspiring professionals only too well from experience. “Young players are subject to enormous fluctuations in form,” he says, “they know that you learn more from negative experiences than from positive ones. So I assume that we will be in better shape in the next few games. “
The now white-bearded Bochum resident also used the opportunity to talk about the qualitative deficits in the training of talents in Germany. “We have to start one-on-one very early,” says the 67-year-old football teacher, who speaks from extensive experience, “we have to fight one-on-one and put the ball in the foreground. We have to design training that is fun for the children. ”That sounds like a matter of course, but it doesn’t seem to be the case everywhere.
“An absurdity for young people”
Gerland provides an example of the currently deficient art of playing through a duel. The former defensive specialist at VfL Bochum says, “With us everyone could play one against one in defense. Today we always work in a network. But if I just say pass, pass, pass, I cannot develop a dribbler. If they have only passed until they are 17, they cannot dribble even at 19. ”Which also means that the equally deficiently trained center strikers, formerly a German parade discipline, have the“ fodder ”, i.e. the flanks of the successful dribblers Wings are missing.
From his own experience, Gerland likes to point out another deficit in the large youth departments of the best clubs. “FC Bayern’s U19 have 29 players in their squad. That means, if the coach does not change, 18 players watch the games. That is absurd for young people. They have to play football. I have to design a training session so that seven against seven or eight against eight play. “
Kotrainer Hermann Gerland names problems in youth education.
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Image: dpa
The practitioner Gerland loves his game and does not like football, which comes across as cerebral. His motto for the basic work: “Give the children a ball in small groups. Let them score goals, let them dribble even if they lose the ball or a game. It’s not that bad. They have to be good afterwards. In the junior division, the focus is on the training of the players – and not the success of the team. “
Gerland’s words weigh heavily, as he trained later world champions such as Philipp Lahm, Bastian Schweinsteiger or Mats Hummels in his school of life. His motto is therefore very simple: “Practice makes perfect. It was like that fifty years ago, it is like that today and will be like that in fifty years. ”But how does it sometimes look today? “Today they say, don’t give your opponent a chance to think,” says Gerland, “but when you have the ball, you also have to know what to do with the ball. We have the ball, and suddenly we don’t know what to do next. ”According to Hermann Gerland, things cannot go on like this.
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