“We need a miracle to stay up…” Heinrich said. The bar was quiet, the weather had a lot to do with that, a colder winter and recent snowfall had caused many people to stay indoors.
“We have two in Regensburg and Augsberg. Augsberg has 7 points, there’s no way they are staying up,” replied Heinrich.
“And Ammerbach was voted out, that in and of itself is a win,” Sasha said, finishing her drink. Few tears were shed when the Club President had lost re-election by one of the largest margins in club history. For awhile it looked as if he was going to win again, but an article in Berlin Football Daily on the club mentioned that Coach Schmidt wouldn’t vote for Ammerbach if he could, which led to the boards and chats exploding with theories as to why. Many thought it was due to player and personnel differences, but more than a few thought it was due to the dire financial straights Ammerbach and the rest of the board at the time had put the club in right after their back to back promotions.
“We lose two or three more players to injury, we are going to need that miracle,” said Hans.
“I think we will be fine,” Sasha said, and the table stopped to look at her.
“What?” she said, looking back at them. “I think we were lucky to be promoted when we did. Augsberg is horrible this year, why Zeidler didn’t leave before he was fired is something I will never understand. Regensburg, Hoffenheim and Cologne are all having down years. Yes, we might end up in the Relegation Playoffs, but I think we can scrape by.”
“RUMINT says Reims approached him,” Dietrich said after finishing his own drink.
“Reims and Lazio did,” Sasha said, looking down at the table.
“Reims, no. Lazio…maybe?” ventured Heinrich.
“Replacing Nuno?” Dietrich said. “They say Gallardo is on the shortlist.”
“Reims is having internal issue of their own, two failed takeover bids so far,” Uwe sai, looking at his phone. “Odd as it sounds, staying in Berlin is probably the best move for him.”
“He won’t leave,” Sasha said, “Not anytime soon anyways. If had wanted to leave he would have jumped at any of the offers last year, or the year before. No, he’s here for the long haul, and so are we.” She waved her mug at the waitress, who responded with a nod and headed to the tap.
This summer I am purging my medical department.
All three of these injuries hurt, but Injai and Rukavina really hurt. Injai had 8 goals across all competitions, and was a consistent scoring threat. Rukavina will be familiar to those of you who followed my ASSE save on Youtube, he was a solid winger there, and he has similar attributes this time around. Even better was that he was available on a free, as Burnley had let him go. He came in, scored two goals, then broke his ribs. Blivet.
The one thing that is even more troubling than our injuries is our defense.
It’s obvious I don’t have the quality on the backline. There are bright spots, Montanaro and Owusu, but even I can tell the quality of players we’re facing more often than not are so much better than I have at my disposal. Our saving grace is that there are worse teams in the league this season, so if we do stay up, it’s not because we were good enough to stay up, but that we were lucky to be the best of a bad bunch.
And it’s not the fact that we are losing that has me troubled, I expected to lose more games than we won or drew this year, what’s troubling is that were are getting well and truly thumped. We had a stretch of games early on where we lost 5 in a row, scored two goals and gave up 15. Granted, 4 were against Bayern, but still. And it took a 91st minute Eisenhunt goal to secure a win against Cologne, who are terrible this season.
We had a good run to finish October and into November, but Injai going down really hurt us more than I expected, because I had high hoped for the likes of Rodic and Eisenhunt, but it’s clear to me now that Eisenhunt doesn’t have the skills to be a full time Bundesliga player, and Rodic doesn’t have the mentality. If I could combine them together I’d have a pretty good player, but I can’t.
Werder bounced us out of the Pokal, we had a good win against a bad Hoffenheim team, and then lost three in a row going intro the holiday break, Wolfsburg and Eintracht Frankfurt are good squads, but Mainz is having a down year, and losing 1-0 to them was not what I was looking for.
As December came to a close, as our first half a season in the Bundesliga finished, we sit at 5 wins, 3 draws, and 9 losses. That’s 18 points. Doing the same the second half of the season would be 36, and that may just be enough, but I would feel a lot better if some of these close losses were draws and some of the draws were wins, because God help us if it comes down to goal differential…
THE FOOTBALL MANAGER BLOG OF FM_JELLICO 