Max Eberl is a cheerful person who really does not tend to fall into gloom. The fact that the sports director of Borussia Mönchengladbach wore a smile on his lips after the terrible 6-0 defeat against SC Freiburg, as if he was amused by the participation in this record game, seemed a bit strange.
For the first time ever, a home team in the Bundesliga was 5-0 down after 25 minutes, and SC Freiburg has never before scored six goals in a top division game. In addition, for the first time ever, there were six different goalscorers on one team in one half. Perhaps Eberl grinned because he still couldn’t really grasp the incidents, which not only he had found “surreal”. But maybe also because the usual mechanisms started immediately, about which they traditionally only smile tiredly in Mönchengladbach.
He was asked whether the consequences could be expected, and Eberl replied, as was to be expected: “If we get to the point in football that you lose two games and then general questions are asked or suggested, then I can’t accept that identify. Because you decide for something, and then it means to go through thick and thin and not immediately take the decision, something has to be changed. ”So the trainer Adi Hütter does not have to fear for his job for the time being. Because Borussia is a club in which coaches always have a particularly strong position, and certainly also because the problems of this team were known before Hütter’s first day at work.
Something is not right
Borussia is a team that has long needed well-known opponents to play really well. In the past Champions League season, the Gladbach-based company enchanted their fans with impressive games against Inter Milan, Real Madrid and Manchester City. In the current season there was the 5-0 spectacle in the cup against FC Bayern and a win against BVB, but the overall result is sobering. In the previous year the qualification for a European Cup was missed, currently the club is in 13th place in the table, dangerously close to the relegation zone.
The knowledge that Marco Rose was also helpless in dealing with the fluctuations in performance in the first half of the year leads quite directly to the players and the climate in the group. When gate after gate fell on Sunday, Matthias Ginter roared, Yann Sommer also tried to shake up his colleagues with a few commands, and yet everyone seemed somehow to deal with the increasingly concrete decline for themselves. A group of lone fighters has no chance in the Bundesliga.
It is difficult to look into the dressing room from the outside, but in total the many small impressions of the past ten months give the impression of a team that is not always wholeheartedly involved. Observers have been speculating for a long time whether the unexplained future of players whose contracts expire will have a negative impact. It is possible that the identification of some professionals with their club has suffered because the flight soaring through the Champions League raised hopes for a move to larger clubs.
So is the team’s mentality unsuitable for the challenges of a long Bundesliga season? What about the team spirit? The very fact that such questions are being asked is a sure sign that the problems are complex. Even for coach Hütter, this evening of collective self-abandonment was “inexplicable”. Only one thing is clear: something is wrong with this strange team.
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