Laptop Trainer! What does this word have and did this characteristic once trigger a hype in football Germany. They are data nerds, they analyze even the tiniest signals and thus make the players better. Of course there is something when the running distances are measured to the centimeter and the unit of strength in duels is no longer calculated in kiloponds but in Newtons. That’s important and that makes a difference in high-performance sports, where more and more small things decide and there are hardly any secrets in the training system. There should and must be specialists for this. However, for a few years it seemed that qualifications that had become essential, such as human maturity or one’s own professional experience, had lost significantly in importance for finding the truth on the pitch.
Urs Fischer and Christian Streichen were considered a dying species
From the point of view of progressiveness that had become modern in the course of the Pep Guardiola era (the Catalan has enough professional experience, no question), which was sometimes more appearance than reality, the days of down-to-earth guys like Urs Fischer and Christian Streich seemed almost numbered . They, both 56, but the one from Breisgau a good eight months older than the one from Berlin, were considered a dying species, especially since they were the oldest of their kind in the Bundesliga before Felix Magath jumped back on the carousel.
Now Methuselah I and Methuselah II meet at the weekend. As always, it will be about tactics and who looks best at who, plays the balls behind the line and is efficient. But with both it will also be about what and, above all, how I communicate with the players. Streich, who hasn’t known any other life as a coach than that at SC Freiburg, which has been in youth teams since 1995, is undoubtedly a master of his craft in this discipline. Fischer, even a little calmer on the outside, usually finds the right tone.
Union Fischer and Freiburg’s prank in front of new records
–Despite all the laptop modernity, it is a deeply human sign that these two guys are not only among the oldest, but are now the longest-serving coaches in the Bundesliga. Nothing even comes close to Otto Rehhagel and his legendary record at Werder Bremen with 480 games in a row from 1981 to 1995. But Streich is about to play his 320th game on the sidelines of Breisgau in Germany’s top division and Fischer is about to play his 100th – that’s something. However, while Fischer is the unassailable record coach of the Irons in the Bundesliga for years, he is the only one apart from the one-game exception with Markus Hoffmann, Streich is number 2 in the extreme south-west of the republic with a deficit of 20 games behind Volker Finke. Still.
So the human old people do it. They’re definitely stirring up the league. In the game of millions, whether in victory or almost even more in defeat, they make for great cinema. Sporty – with two rounds before the end of the season, one of them is still looking a little at the Champions League and the DFB Cup anyway, the other is reaching for the key with the Schlosserjungs again this season to open the door to Europe – and even more human
Football is fun with Fischer and Streich
When others get angry that the opponent has one player too many on the pitch, Streich remains completely composed and says, as if it doesn’t concern him: “There are rules for that, right?” And when others vehemently demand a penalty , because Niko Gießelmann was clearly fouled by Nordi Mukiele and everyone rightly called for a penalty, but the referee brushed him off despite looking at the video images, Fischer also rested in himself and said, as if he were talking about a completely different game: “The The referee decided that…” You have to be able to endure so much calm blood first.
With Fischer and Streich in the coaching zones, football is simply fun. It has something of its originality back, even if up to 25 TV cameras recorded everything in some games in the Bundesliga or up to 43 in the European Championship last year and some outbursts, be they happy, be angry, maybe on the back burner press. The two do not stage themselves, they do everything they can for the cause and do not forget to be polite or respectful. That’s very old and, so to speak, high school.
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