»With this charisma it will be very difficult to become German champion«: Oliver Kahn picks his own nose
FC Bayern Munich seems helpless, at a loss, headless after the 3-1 defeat at 1. FSV Mainz 05 on Saturday. “I don’t know who wanted to be German champion here? There were red jerseys on the pitch, but that was definitely not our team,” puzzled CEO Oliver Kahn after the game. He attacked the players and spoke of a “disaster” if the current season ended without a title. That was last the case in the 2011/12 season. Bayern Munich lost to Manchester City in the Champions League and to SC Freiburg in the DFB Cup. In the Bundesliga, pursuers Borussia Dortmund took advantage of Bayern’s defeat and took the lead in the table by beating Eintracht Frankfurt 4-0 with a one-point lead.
It had just last Thursday evening at an event of Bild The Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder not only firmly believed in the championship title for FC Bayern Munich, but also blusteredly insulted the competitor from Dortmund: “The Dortmunders are actually almost too stupid to become German champions,” he said. However, it is important that the team finally emits more goal danger and puts more concentration on the pitch, the politician added, and also gave lifestyle advice along the way: “Less hairstyles, less fashion, less trappings.”
Unlike Bavarian state politics, football apparently works without a hairstyle. As far as the game philosophy, in which good advice is of course expensive, especially if it has to come from Markus “Invictus” Söder.
Kahn, who was conjuring up the impending catastrophe, continued to protect his coach Thomas Tuchel, but railed against almost everything else: “What have we tried in the second half of the season: players, systems, tactics, change of coach. In the end, there are eleven men on the field who have to work their ass off for the goals of this club,” he said in a typical angry speech on Saturday. “That’s what it’s all about and nothing else. With this charisma it will be very difficult to become German champion.«
Coach Tuchel, on the other hand, looks like the most helpless of all. He had his first coaching job in the Bundesliga in Mainz from 2009 to 2014 and experienced a bitter return. He found his team dead tired and fatalistic: »The team looks like they’ve already played 80 games. She looks drained.”
Club president Herbert Hainer ruled out direct consequences for the time being, despite losing the lead in the table. According to information from Bild from Sunday, however, a quick replacement of Wutredner Kahn is “now a conceivable scenario”. Regarding the possible consequences, Hainer said with a gloomy expression: “First of all, we are concentrating on the German championship. That will be hard enough, as we saw today. We’ll talk about everything else later.”
Whether or not achieving that minimum goal will save Kahn’s position is uncertain. Especially since Kahn’s criticism of an apparently insecure to exhausted team seemed more like a distraction from their own mistakes. His backing for Tuchel, whom he brought in together with sports director Hasan Salihamidzic in March to succeed Julian Nagelsmann, adds: “Thomas Tuchel is the last one we have to discuss.” Tuchel only won two games seven competitive games a capital false start. A negative record from Munich – like that of Søren Lerby in 1991/1992.
Tuchel underestimated the task of steering Bayern back on the road to success. Tuchel had no idea how the fashion ensemble could be brought out of the deep. “I’d rather it be obvious what things we can work on. There are no technical, tactical and structural problems,” he said. »I have the feeling that conveying new content now in order to change something again is of no use. Everyone fights with themselves. It’s slipping through our hands.”
Instead of lectures and crisis talks, Tuchel ordered his players to take a three-day break until Wednesday for mental recovery, which was “urgently needed for everyone”. “Because there’s no energy, and we won’t get it if we all call in and keep going.”
Captain Thomas Müller also welcomed this time-out in order to be “picked up by his own family”. “There’s a certain emptiness and helplessness in me.” The team couldn’t shake off the setbacks in the cup and in the Champions League “somewhere deep inside,” lamented Müller.
