Bruno Labbadia is exactly the right coach that VfB needs right now. After all, he names the problems! The good Simeon Kramer knows that, after all he was at the training camp in Marbella! And that’s what he tells us in every episode of the ZVW’s high-quality journalistic podcast. And reliable over and over again. Because he’s proud of it. And because he doesn’t do court reporting. Which becomes even more credible with every unsolicited repetition of this statement. And because the team is just too bad (because it was put together by Mislintat, which the cheeky Simeon subtly resonates with in the subtext when he’s not – to put it in his style – raving about his Bruno _does_).
Seriously: I’ve now arrived at gallows humor. Everyone, really everyone who didn’t want to argue the opposite and who even have a shred of memory of Bruno’s first term in office (well, admittedly, I would have preferred to have suppressed that too), knew that nothing would improve with this coach becomes. He talks a lot (and so clearly! And so extensively! – at this point journalist apprentice and Bruno fanboy Kramer introduce how he misses one), but achieves absolutely nothing. The team plays uninspired, it is actually a step backwards compared to Rino, where VfB mostly just missed out on victories.
A concept is missing, there is no recognizable plan going forward and the great mentor, the “father figure” (in love: Kramer) Labbadia is not able to give his men security, which is shown in every game by individual mistakes (which according to Kramer not because of him, of course, but because of the TEAM). Bruno is much more the living proof that the most passionately overrated empty phrase in football vocabulary – the nonsense of “experience” – does not score points on its own. It’s not enough to artificially raise the average age of the team by getting a bench presser from Köpenick, for whom you’re selling off a talent that had just established itself and would certainly not have brought in less money in the summer.
Our games since the long winter break are sad. A Simeon Kramer in front of his Vogt-Wehrle-Labbadia shrine can still rave about the supposed “chest solver” in the cup, which was nothing more than a relatively embarrassing performance against a brave but limited second division team, from which only two lucky ones made it goals shortly before the end a victory could be achieved. Not in one game did it seem like the boys were going to tear themselves out for their magician on the bench, or take home three points at all costs. It seems much more as if this team has more or less resigned itself to the fact that others (especially Gelsenkirchen and Berlin-West) could manage their own non-relegation, but you have very little influence on that yourself.
In any healthy environment, in any reasonably semi-professional club, Labbadia would never have been resuscitated. And in such an environment one could also admit that his appointment was a mistake that should be corrected before it’s too late. But as it is, we are staggering, controlled by what is probably the most incompetent management team in recent decades, in the direction of relegation and let Labbadia say in an interview “we know that we lack accuracy in the last third. We know that, but we can’t change that”.
But hey, the ultras, together with their “journalistic” mouthpiece from the ZVW, stand behind their sun king, his carnival prince and handsome Bruno. Nothing can go wrong. It’s a good thing that with Freiburg and Cologne we now have two very easy tasks to face our heap of rubble. And then there’s a final in Gelsenkirchen, which I can’t really look forward to given the conditions. Speaking of the final: What is Nico Willig doing right now?