Bayer Leverkusen starts the season worse than ever. The crisis of the top team is real – and can not be solved that easily.
The worst false start in the club’s history was explained surprisingly quickly. Bayer Leverkusen is at the bottom of the table, an outrageously expensive top team is losing game after game, but it’s really quite simple. “Football,” said coach Gerardo Seoane, “lives on the state of mind.” And what about the mood of the Bayer pros? “There is uncertainty.”
The 0:3 (0:2) against TSG Hoffenheim was the low point so far in the young season, and it was the moment when a crisis in results turned into a real sporting crisis: Simple things no longer work out because the paralyze self-doubt. And solving this blockade is not that easy.
“It’s a difficult moment for us as a club and for me personally,” said Seoane, who has great expectations at Leverkusen. The Swiss took over last summer and allowed the team to play high-scoring attacking football. Leverkusen had their best season in nine years and are back in the Champions League.
These days, however, the premier class seems very far away. Bayer were eliminated by third division side SV Elversberg in the DFB Cup and then lost the first three league games – four defeats in four competitive games at the start, that had never happened for Bayer.
And while the previous defeats were all somehow unfortunate, the bankruptcy against Hoffenheim was fully deserved. TSG did little more than defend “solidarity and aggressively”, as coach Andre Breitenreiter described it: They wanted to use the “current moment of stress” of the opponent.
That worked. TSG made a couple of successful counterattacks and scored from Christoph Baumgartner (9′), Andrej Kramaric (35′) and Georginio Rutter (78′). Above all, the once again early deficit was probably an effective hit.
Misunderstandings, ball losses, wrong decisions
“If there is uncertainty, then there are misunderstandings, turnovers, wrong decisions,” said Seoane later. It will now be interesting to see whether and how Bayer can get a grip on this problem, which now seems to be in the players’ minds. The crisis has developed its own momentum.
“Of course the defeats affect us, but we just have to be professional and mature enough,” said Jonathan Tah. It is now important “to find a simple game, to be stable together,” said Bayer’s sporting director Simon Rolfes.
Seoane, the beacon of hope, must now quickly manage this crisis. A tricky task awaits in Mainz next Saturday, but you don’t want to doubt the coach. Seoane is the right one, “definitely, one hundred percent,” said club boss Fernando Carro on “Bild-TV”.