Niko Kovac is already under pressure at VfL Wolfsburg after a historically bad start to the season – and massively criticizes his team.
Niko Kovac, gray three-day beard, a few wrinkles on his forehead, looked grim – and then dismantled his team. “Much too little”. “careless”. “Not aggressive enough”. “Too many errors”. Kovac didn’t hold back after VfL Wolfsburg’s harmless performance against 1. FC Köln and the worst start to the season in the club’s history: “We all have to question whether what we’re doing is enough, I don’t think so.”
It was 2:4 (1:3) at the end, but even more frightening than the result was the weak, lethargic performance of the wolves. “We want to see you fight,” the fans chanted over and over again. More evidence of poverty is not really possible. Franz Beckenbauer would probably have once again felt reminded of “the traditional Uwe-Seeler team”.
It didn’t sound much nicer with Kovac, he practically denied his team the basic virtues of football. “When ‘defending’, says the Croatian, you sometimes have to ‘bring your body in’.
But Captain Maximilian Arnold and Co. did not. “Defend. It’s really all about: you or me,” said Kovac: “And everyone has to ask themselves after the game: Did I win the duel against my opponent or not?”
Table basement, only two points from five games, weakest start to the season since promotion 25 years ago. But it’s “not that I’m at a loss,” said Kovac, under whom everything should get better in Wolfsburg: “But I think we have many types of players who don’t tend to seek contact like other teams do .” What was meant was physical contact in a duel – not exactly a compliment for a professional footballer. And: “One must not surrender.”
So the crisis is finally here at the factory club. “Kovac out” was (still) called out sporadically. “It will be uncomfortable for Niko Kovac,” wrote the picture on Sunday.
“We have to be careful that we don’t let ourselves be divided,” said sports director Marcel Schäfer, who, together with managing director Jörg Schmadtke, brought Kovac in order to promote more “we” than “I” in Wolfsburg.
Since Oliver Glasner left Wolfsburg, not much has come together. Mark van Bommel and Florian Kohfeldt failed quickly, and Kovac is still looking for solutions.
So how should the turnaround succeed? In any case, it has to be “damn fast,” said Kovac. In training before the game at Glasner’s Eintracht Frankfurt next Saturday, things should really get going. “We probably really need to do what my brother and I did,” Kovac said. And if Niko and Robert Kovac used to be able to do one thing, it was: fight, bite, dig, give everything.