THEIf the past 36 competitive games that FSV Mainz 05 played this year under Bo Svensson were played in the form of a dartboard and threw three arrows, it would be difficult, even blindfolded, not to achieve a “One Hundred and Eightyyyy”. The second half of the previous season and the first half of the current season were so richly peppered with outstanding moments, with exciting games, with exciting decisions.
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The 3: 2 against RB Leipzig at the beginning of the second half of the season with two equalizer goals from Moussa Niakhaté and the cross from Danny da Costa, which Leandro Barreiro poked past keeper Peter Gulacsi into the short corner, was one of the goose bumps. Or the draw in Leverkusen, when Mainz conceded the 0-2 in the 84th minute, but winter signing Robert Glatzel (89th) and Kevin Stöger saved a point in stoppage time. Or the cup game against Arminia Bielefeld with Marcus Ingvartsen’s winning goal in extra time.
When asked about the highlights, sports director Christian Heidel first mentions the 3-2 win at 1. FC Köln in April – “It’s really special when you score the winning goal in the 93rd minute”. Such events were surpassed, however, from the day on which it was clear that the 05er of the league would be retained. This last act of the rescue mission took place on Saturday afternoon without any action on your part, the home game against Borussia Dortmund was only on Sunday and was marked by the previous night’s non-relegation celebration. What Heidel touched: “I noticed that a lot of people in Mainz were happy because we stayed and achieved the extraordinary.”
With this, the club achieved one of the main goals that the new managers had set around the turn of the year: to inspire the fans again, to bind the people of Mainz back to the club. “In January we felt that we had lost something to the people. And now everyone has given their thumbs up. “
“Association moved back together”
Bo Svensson does not find it difficult to pick out highlights in the form of individual games, but for him it is less about individual 90 minutes than about a certain feeling. The home game against RB Leipzig at the start of the new season embodied this feeling. “It was our first game with spectators and it took place in a special constellation”, he refers to the Corona quarantine, in which a large part of the regular players and also some members of the coaching staff were.
“We all had to stick together so brutally, and I felt again what we are capable of when we set an example of what we are,” says Svensson. Without the 10,500 fans in the stadium who unconditionally cheered the team on, the 1-0 success would not have been possible, the coach emphasizes. “That was when you noticed that this club had come together again.”
Svensson mentions a second outstanding moment, one that happened behind closed doors, in the dining room after a final training session. A few months had passed since his arrival, and it must have been very loud, “because everyone was talking to each other across the room,” he says – no comparison with the “non-mood” in the cabin at the beginning of January ruled. “I perceived that as a decisive factor in ensuring that the players were able to play like this in the second half of the season and ultimately get the points,” says Svensson. It was possible to create a culture “in which one likes to come to work and like to go through resistance with one another”.
Overcoming resistance will always be a task for a club of the size and financial resources of FSV Mainz 05. The current season, however, seems to be the first in six years in which the Rheinhessen are not in the non-relegation battle until shortly before the end. The team seems too stable for that, and has put up with the long-term loss of regular staff too well for that. Whether that will lead to international business, as in the spring of 2016 under coach Martin Schmidt, today’s sports director, is secondary, but possible. If the Mainz team signed a really fast (and goal-scoring) striker in January, who has not been in the squad so far, the chances increased.
They would like to take such a competition with them, but first and foremost is belonging to the 18 best German teams. Or, as Heidel said earlier as the 05 manager: “We want to extend the contract with the Bundesliga.”
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