Against ex-club initially outside
Anyone who knows the careers of Niko Kovac and Max Kruse shouldn’t be surprised that many people around VfL Wolfsburg asked this summer: The new coach and his idiosyncratic star – can that ever go well? The preliminary answer is a resounding “yes” with a small “but”. Because of all things on the first Bundesliga matchday against his former club Werder Bremen (Saturday, 3.30 p.m.) Kruse will initially only sit on the bench. “Max first had a calf injury and then got sick. He certainly has some catching up to do. So it won’t be a start from the beginning,” Kovac confirmed on Thursday.
Otherwise, there is an impressive list of at least ten players in Wolfsburg who have already left or are expected to leave a much too large squad after Kovac started work in June. But Kruse doesn’t like it.
According to a report in the “Wolfsburger Allgemeine Zeitung”, the coach and his number 9 met early on outside the club premises for an exchange. “Max is a great boy, I only have positive things to say,” said Kovac later during the training camp in Tyrol. He is a player who “despite his 34 years can always score 15 goals per season and play five to ten more. Always! He has the quality that not many in the Bundesliga have. When he’s fit and physically able to do everything he can, he has skills like Thomas Müller.”
Since the promotion to the Bundesliga: All Wolfsburg coaches with a record
Max Kruse has a lot of competition on the offensive at VfL Wolfsburg
So Kruse’s real challenge in Wolfsburg is not Kovac, but one that he doesn’t know from Bremen: Because he has strong competition at VfL – in terms of quality and quantity. Lukas Nmecha, Jonas Wind, Bartosz Bialek, Omar Marmoush, Luca Waldschmidt, Maximilian Philipp, Jakub Kaminski and Patrick Wimmer: In addition to Kruse, at least eight other professionals are available for four places on the offensive. Five of them are senior internationals, six of them at least ten years younger than the former Werder captain.
For comparison: In Bremen and also at Union Berlin, Kruse was a so-called difference player for a long time, whose loss Werder could never replace in 2019 and whose commitment raised 1. FC Union 2020 to a different sporting level. Even in Wolfsburg, he was a key transfer in January, turning the mood in the dressing room and saving a battered team from relegation.
This situation has changed. His close confidante Florian Kohfeldt is no longer there. And from a purely sporting point of view, Kruse is no longer a savior, but currently only a challenger. Nevertheless, all fears about the relationship between Kovac and Kruse like to suppress the fact that the 14-time national player always got along particularly well with strong coaching personalities: Christian Streich in Freiburg, for example, or Lucien Favre at Borussia Mönchengladbach. “Max is Max,” Streich said about him in March. With Kruse you can “laugh from time to time. From time to time we see extraordinary passes and beautiful goals. What more do we want?”
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