Cologne coach Steffen Baumgart sees no striker problem

Before the Bundesliga home game of his 1. FC Köln against BVB on Saturday (3:30 p.m.), coach Steffen Baumgart addresses the problem of strikers at FC Bayern and in Germany. The ex-attacker does not see any major problems.

“Bayern has everything – except a striker problem,” Baumgart said in an interview with the TV station.sky‘ and explained: ‘They’re having one or two problems scoring a goal at the moment. But if you look at the odds, they’re absolutely top-class.”

With the exception of the 1-1 draw at leaders Union Berlin, FC Bayern, who lost top scorer Robert Lewandowski to FC Barcelona in the summer, “had had a majority of chances in every game,” Baumgart reminded: “It’s not a striker problem , but simply a problem in the situation that you don’t score the goals.”

The 50-year-old is convinced that this will “change again” and remarked: “Too much is being interpreted negatively into it.”

Baumgart: “If you don’t have things, maybe you should train them”

Baumgart, who went chasing goals for Hansa Rostock and VfL Wolfsburg in the first Bundesliga between 1995 and 1999, took up his training as a striker in Germany when asked by “Sky”. “If you don’t have things, maybe you should train them,” said Cologne’s head coach.

“Perhaps we should train a nine again and not keep explaining to the youngsters that we need a little tweak here and a tweak there and a fit there,” Baumgart said a little further.

Specifically, the ex-attacker was concerned that the training should not only look at technical finesse: “A nine is not a delicate player, but sometimes rather a robust, larger striker.”

“Robustness, struggle, a lot of mentality and a lot of willingness to run” named Baumgart as attributes that would have distinguished the German Football Association in the past: “Maybe we’ll get it solved that we don’t always look at what others are doing.”

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