You know your way around VfL Bochum with defeats at the start, and it was time against Darmstadt. Bochum is already under pressure against SV Elversberg on the second matchday.
The fans of VfL Bochum are used to grief at the start of the season. In 2016 the last win was achieved on a matchday 1, in the past nine years VfL lost its opening match – regardless of the league – eight times. So the 1: 4 in Darmstadt was actually nothing unusual last weekend.
But of course it’s all different. The alarm bells on Castroper Straße are shrinking. And before the first home game of the season – against the SV Elversberg on Sunday (1.30 p.m.), the protagonists strive to calm the minds.
“We imagined differently”
“Of course, a 1: 4 is anything but tingling at the start, we imagined it differently. But we analyzed the whole thing and know what was not good,” said Maximilian Wittek in “Reviersport” before the game against last year’s surprise team of the 2nd division.
“Everything analyzes” – Maximilian Wittek
The Saarlanders missed the promotion to the Bundesliga, under success coach Horst Steffen, only wafer and unhappy in the relegation games against 1. FC Heidenheim.
Beware of SV Elversberg!
Coach Steffen has now said goodbye towards Bremen and a few key players have been lost, but that doesn’t seem to have made a lot of agree on the underdog. Last week, the team presented itself playfully again at the start of the season and won 1-0 against 1. FC Nürnberg.
Nevertheless, there must be no other goal for the Bochumer than a home win, but some things have to change compared to the appearance in Darmstadt. “We were simply too dirty in many actions, the distances between the team parts were too big,” believes Wittek.
Trainer eaten
Trainer Dieter Hecking was already eaten in the training week, the sound was rough. Immediately after the opening match, the coach had admitted that he “thought that we were already in defensive performance.”
In the game backwards it wasn’t wrong. Two standard gates passed due to passivity, in midfield the opposing offensive prey was given considerably too much space for their play. “We have arrived tough on the ground of the facts and have to do a lot better to survive in the 2nd league. Darmstadt showed us,” analyzed Timo Horn in the VfL magazine “deep in the west”.
Hope for Hofmann and Broschinski
Put off defense errors and become more dangerous – this should be the motto for VfL. But with the offensive department, it’s just a thing. With Philipp Hofmann and Moritz Broschinski, both strikers in Darmstadt had to be replaced in the course of the game. After all, both trained with the team from Wednesday and should be ready for use. This is also the case with dribbler Gerrit Holtmann, who is available again after a break of injury and could cause danger over the outside.
Care is announced in Bochum, but you don’t want to know anything about panic after a game day. “I think it would be fatal if we throw everything overboard now,” says Routinier Wittek. And Keeper Horn finds: “I stay that we had good preparation that will help us in the course of the season.”
Our sources:
- Online magazine Reviersport
- VfL Bochum website
- VfL magazine “deep in the west”
- News agencies SID and dpa
