Thursday, December 9th, 2021
No improvement under Kohfeldt
The pathetic failure of wolves in Europe
In the shadow of the four chimneys of the Volkswagen factory, VfL Wolfsburg does not want to achieve much this season. Early cup exit, coach change, mediocrity in the league and now the miserable failure in the Champions League. There is another crisis on the Mittelland Canal.
Strong expressions are rarely a good sign in football. What VfL Wolfsburg now has to do after the sobering elimination in the Champions League in order to get back on track at least in the Bundesliga, the striker Luca Waldschmidt became after the 1: 3 (0: 1) against the French champions OSC Lille asked. “Pinch your ass cheeks and go full throttle on Saturday against Stuttgart,” replied the seven-time German international. If it just could be that easy.
Because on Wednesday evening, Wolfsburg gave up a “historic chance” (coach Florian Kohfeldt) in the most important European club competition with a remarkably dispassionate hand. A win against Lille would have been enough to progress, the last place in this very balanced, but not really high-class preliminary group G came out in the end. Neither the performance on the pitch nor the atmosphere in the Volkswagen Arena, which was only filled with 6544 spectators, did justice to the importance of this game and the aura of the competition. “It just wasn’t ready for the Champions League,” Kohfeldt told ZDF.
Coach rogue doesn’t pay off
What is particularly striking is that the team that flew out of the Champions League at the beginning of December no longer has much in common with the “Elf vom Mittellandkanal”, who brought the Volkswagen Club there only in mid-May. And that despite the fact that 11 of the 16 players played against Lille were already part of the squad last season. But the shortcomings that Kohfeldt listed on Wednesday correspond almost exactly to the qualities that made VfL strong up until the summer: There are problems “to defend steadily. To play the game against the ball. That we have a lot of difficulty outside of it to create opportunities from standard and switching situations, “said the coach.
Kohfeldt must now try with great effort to bring VfL back to the level that it had long ago in the spring. The further development propagated in the summer has long since ceased to exist. One question is therefore whether the core mistake was really getting the wrong coach in Kohfeldt’s predecessor Mark van Bommel in July. Or whether you might not have done enough beforehand to keep Oliver Glasner as the right coach.
Average on the Mittelland Canal
The Austrian led VfL into the Champions League, no longer got on with sports director Jörg Schmadte – and then replaced Adi Hütter, who had moved to Mönchengladbach, at Eintracht Frankfurt. Wolfsburg was fourth in the Bundesliga in the summer and is now eighth, Frankfurt was fifth and is now tenth, Borussia even fell from a disappointing eighth place to an even more disappointing 13th place. So far, this coaching rogue has not paid off for any of the clubs involved.
Kohfeldt is supposed to repair this damage in Wolfsburg. The 39-year-old started with three wins at the end of October and now said: “I think that the first week hid a lot.” There are “a few things that take some time. And it is still my job to radiate positive energy and solve these problems.”
The fact that three successful years can be followed by a phase of stagnation is nothing new in football. That individual players like Wout Weghorst, after developing from almost relegated to Champions League club, think carefully about which career options they still have. But a first round out in the DFB Cup, the preliminary round knockout. in a comparatively weak Champions League group and a thoroughly mediocre Bundesliga record: “That is not our claim, that is not what we expect from us,” said Waldschmidt. “We could all go a step further.”