With Torsten Fink leaving and the
club starting another domestic season poorly will the sleeping giant of the
Bundesliga ever be revived?
Last weekend Dortmund were
awesome. There’s no other word for
it. Some of the attacking lines their
players ran would have any team struggling to cope with. On counterattacks at times the player in
possession had six or seven of his own players steaming past him. But bloody hell were Hamburg awful. And it’s just cost manager Torsten Fink his
job.
This is something that Hamburg
fans have had to live with in recent seasons and it shows no time of stopping
anytime soon. Fink has paid the price
for succumbing to the disorganisation. In
that match alone they tried to line up as a 3-5-2 then 4-4-2 then 4-2-3-1. It made no difference. “The system was not to blame,” Fink said
afterwards. Tough to know which one he
was referring to. Five games into the
season and with a team on four points might seem like sacking a manager too
early. In truth it was difficult to see
where any improvement would come from.
With Hamburg as they are its hard to picture the next guy doing any different.
It’s the wasted potential that
must grate. Even with the mismanagement of
the past decade or more Hamburg are still the fourth biggest in terms of
revenue in Germany. They’re the only
Bundesliga team to have never been relegated.
For a while in the late seventies and early eighties they were one of
the biggest clubs in Europe. They won a
European Cup and got to sign Kevin Keegan.
They should be one of their league’s leading lights. Instead they’re its biggest disappointments. They haven’t won the league since 1983. Haven’t really challenged since finishing
runner up in 1987 either. They have the
other underachieving Bundesliga teams beaten.
Stuggart won a Bundesliga in 2008. At least Schalke and Leverkausen can comfort
themselves with the Champions League.
When it comes to letting their fans down Hamburg can’t be beaten.
It’s not like they haven’t
tried. Fink’s is just the latest in a
long line of false dawns. Before that it
was Frank Arnsen as a high profile sporting director and a new focus on
youth. Which would have been fine if it
had been the right youth. As a broad
experiment in running a club like it was a game of Football Manager (buying boatloads
of promising young players with good stats and throwing them in the team) it
could be judged a success. By any other
measure it was a failure. Six months
after Arnsen left they’ve been left with nothing to show for his era but Michael
Mancienne.
What grated with Hamburger fans the
most about Arnsen’s expensive recruitment of young mainly foreign players was
that it took place in an era when Bundesliga sides were increasingly developing
their own. Hamburg look like they have
been thoroughly left behind. In the
current team there’s only Jansen, Adler and Westermann are established German
players and not one came up through Hamburg’s youth system. The stunning first goal scored by youth team
graduate Lam Zhi Gin against Dortmund may be the way forward. Arnsen used to give interviews asking for
more time for his young players to settle in and bring success. Dortmund themselves were always the example
he gave of a team that did this. They
were of course lower when almost out of business in 2008 than Hamburg are
now. Emulating them and their successful
integration of talented young players is easier said than done.
Van der Vaart’s return after
stopping off at Real Madrid and Tottenham hasn’t had the desired effect
either. Now captain, he’s shown his best
form only in patches. Helping to repeat
the third place finish of his first stay looks impossible. Last season their form fluctuated wildly and
they ended up finishing a disappointing 7th in a tight league. Bluntly, Van der Vaart is no longer the
player he once was and influencing games on his own looks beyond him. Outside of him Hamburg have a squad filled
with decent players (Jansen, Adler, Rincon, Jiracek, Westermann, Badelj) with
no real stardust. There aren’t many
players already there that you’d be comfortable building a team around.
Truth be told this season already
looked like being written off before the events of this weekend. The start they’ve had wasn’t so much disastrous
as uninspiring (the 1-5 home loss to Hoffenheim aside). At this point the club have been managed so
poorly that they’ve got no hope of turning around without someone starting
again from the ground up. With their
next game against a newly confident Weder Bremen team in the Nordderby they’ll
want a new manager in as quickly as possible.
With the club in the state they’re in its difficult to know who’ll want
the job. It needs someone to come in and
start again with enough energy to see the project through. It might be worth them seeing if Jurgen Klopp’s
available.
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