Niclas Füllkrug must have felt a deep grudge if he stuck to the resolution he made after Bremen’s 3-2 defeat at Viktoria Köln. The Werder captain said he wanted to “hold back a bit” with his opinion, before formulating words that didn’t sound reserved.
“To put it in extreme terms, we are known to be stupid when it comes to defending and we conceded three goals against a third division team,” said Füllkrug angrily, describing what might have been the game-winning action of his teammate Amos Pieper, who was sent off after ten minutes due to an emergency brake, as “stupid” and ” not clever”.
The whole team should “not be too bad” for such a working day in the football province, “must lead the duels better and then be a bit more unconditional”. Exactly these problems were already recognizable in the previous year. If Füllkrug really withheld essential parts of his criticism, truly dark thoughts must have gone through his head.
Everything the same
In the end, the national striker, from whom it is still unclear whether he will change clubs, even made an indirect threat: “It is important for me that we have a team that we all believe in, that we believe that we’re playing a better season than last year. Then it will remain that Werder is a very good option.” Translated, this means: Füllkrug would like to leave the club if the planned transfers, which are about to take place, are not convincing.
For the time being, however, everything is the same at Werder, and that’s not good news four days before the game against FC Bayern, which opens the new Bundesliga season on Friday. There was not a single newcomer in the starting XI. Developments and a process of renewal are not yet recognizable, Naby Keita, who came from Liverpool FC, is injured and Dawid Kownacki (last from Düsseldorf) was on the bench for 90 minutes. Even the record that the DFB Cup statistics reported fit into the picture of stagnation.
For the sixth time in the past 13 years, Werder were eliminated right at the start of the competition. In total, Bremen even had eleven first-round defeats as a Bundesliga club against a lower-class club. They hold the record in the ranking of first-round embarrassments. Füllkrug quarreled: “This is a third division team. You have to claim that we can finish it with one man less if you take the lead twice.”
Ducksch (43rd minute) and Füllkrug (77th) had scored for Werder, but Cologne found better and better ways to show off their superiority game and were finally able to celebrate a classic cup history: David Philipp is a Bremen fan at his favorite club trained and played for Werder II until 2021. Now he scored the 1-1 (72nd) and 2-2 (79th) for Cologne before Donny Bogicevic scored the winning goal in the fourth minute of injury time.
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“If you dream of a game like that, then you dream of a game like this,” said Philipp, who “had the feeling from the first minute” that his team “could definitely pull the thing”. That says something about the good form of the Cologne third division team, but above all affects Bremen, who could have a difficult season ahead of them.
