In German football there is currently a lot of talk about the two big success factors that somehow have to come together harmoniously so that extraordinary things can succeed: mentality and quality. The U-17 world champions have managed this in an exemplary manner in the past few weeks, but the senior national team is desperate for exactly this challenge. And around the reforms of youth football decided by the German Football Association, there is a lot of debate about the right balance between football training and will-power training.
It’s fitting that related considerations came into focus on Saturday when looking back on Borussia Mönchengladbach’s 2-1 win over TSG Hoffenheim. “It wasn’t a footballing treat today,” said Gladbach captain Florian Neuhaus. However, Borussia “handled the resistance and the difficulties” excellently, noted coach Gerardo Seoane. Hoffenheim’s style of play was clearly superior in quality, “but we didn’t have the necessary punch to kill the opponent,” criticized TSG coach Pellegrino Matarazzo.
“The team is intact”
There are thousands of football matches every weekend that follow the age-old “mentality beats quality” motif, but in this case it was particularly interesting. Because in the first third of the season, the North Baden team had actually successfully combated their long-standing mental weakness. They were still unbeaten away from home until the trip to the Lower Rhine. And because the Gladbachers haven’t necessarily stood out for their particularly strong resilience so far this season. Now they also had to contend with major personnel problems.
In addition to a number of long-term injuries, Maximilian Wöber, Julian Weigl, Jordan and Tomas Cvancara were ill or suffered muscle injuries in the days before this game. Shortly after the break, Nico Elvedi was also out, but a group of players, all around 20 years old, including Manu Koné, Luca Netz, Joe Scally, Rocco Reitz, Nathan Ngomou and, after Elvedi’s loss, Fabio Chiarodia, created remarkable stability and defensiveness. His team played very “disciplined” and never “lost face of the game,” said Seoane, who praised the atmosphere in the group: “The team is intact.”
The Gladbachers have won four home games in a row across all competitions, and more would have been possible in the most recent away games. In Dortmund (2:4) and Freiburg (3:3), the team led by two goals each, but in the end only earned a total of one point. The trend is promising and was apparently initiated after the bad derby defeat at 1. FC Köln. “After the Cologne game, we became a little closer together, and that’s becoming more and more apparent now,” said sports director Nils Schmadtke.
Christoph Kramer described this fruitful development process even more specifically: The team has had a very good mentality in recent years, he said, but: “If you lose your playing class, then you need a different system of play, maybe less with the ball, and then It quickly looks more intense.” The Gladbachers are currently “difficult to play against”, even if they are “sometimes deeper in the back”.
Little success story
Seoane, together with the sporting management around squad planner Steffen Korell, sports director Nils Schmadtke and sports director Roland Virkus, made a paradigm shift away from Daniel Farke’s somewhat sedate ball possession game towards a more flexible style of play.
This is a small success story that may be moving towards a tipping point: the gap to the relegation region is constantly growing, and the European Cup places are now closer than the relegation place. And quite a few Gladbachers are toying with the opportunities that the DFB Cup offers this season.
Borussia Dortmund plays VfB Stuttgart in the round of 16, otherwise all the big clubs apart from Bayer Leverkusen are eliminated. A win against the troubled Wolfsburg on Tuesday (8:45 p.m. in the FAZ live ticker for the DFB Cup, on ARD and on Sky) would send Gladbach into the round of the last eight. With a little luck, a lot is possible.
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But no one from the club wants to get involved in such mind games publicly at the moment. Schmadtke simply said that it was “a different competition” and probably meant that it didn’t make sense to transfer conclusions from the Bundesliga to the cup. But the mood is good in Mönchengladbach before the round of 16 game against VfL.
