Seven games into the season and 100 days into Juergen Klinsmann tenure. October 7th, 2008
Seven games into the season and 100 days into Juergen Klinsmann tenure. Bayern Munich is off to its worst Bundesliga start in more than three decades.
The “Klinsmann out” chants have already started.
The defending champions are 11th in the standings with nine points, trailing leader Hamburger SV by seven. The last time Bayern had a similarly poor start was 31 years ago, when it finished 12th. In the Champions League at least, Bayern has one win and one draw.
“Bayern belongs elsewhere in the standings,” Klinsmann said. “It hurts, but I am fighter by nature. I know where the problems are at the moment. Every players has to show that his heart is 100 percent for Bayern.”
The latest setback came Saturday, when Bayern squandered a 3-1 lead and allowed Bochum to score two late goals and escape with a draw. The team was jeered off the field.
“That hurt,” Klinsmann said. “We will talk to the players about the fans’ anger.”
So far, Bayern management has stood behind Klinsmann, whose only coaching experience was when he led Germany to a third-place finish at the 2006 World Cup at home. He has never coached a club team before.
“We have all the patience in the world,” Bayern chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge said. “We have full confidence in Juergen.”
General manager Uli Hoeness saw the problem more with the players than the coach.
“Some of them should be asking themselves whether their performances correspond to their salaries,” Hoeness said.
The man whose word carries the most weight, club president Franz Beckenbauer, has urged patience.
“I don’t see any rift between Klinsmann and the players. He needs time until his ideas take root. We have to be patient,” Beckenbauer wrote in his Monday column in Bild newspaper.
Beckenbauer also criticized the players for loose marking.
Klinsmann has never shied away from experiments but some of them have backfired at Bayern.
Under predecessor Ottmar Hitzfeld, Bayern stuck with a 4-4-2 formation; Klinsmann has often used a 3-5-2 system, then switching back to 4-4-2 when that did not work for long. The result: Bayern has conceded 13 goals after seven games while it allowed only 21 goals last season (34 games).
“We should not be allowing so many goals,” said midfielder Bastian Schweinsteiger, one of the few players who has shown progress under Klinsmann.
Klinsmann has been resting players and using different lineups, which has not helped the team play as a unit, especially in defense.
Before the season, Klinsmann picked midfielder Mark van Bommel as his captain. The Dutchman has spent the last month mostly sitting on the bench.
“It’s a little bit unusual when your captain is sitting on the bench,” Schweinsteiger said.
Klinsmann and his 11-man staff have little to show after 100 days in charge. Among Klinsmann’s expensive innovations was a state-of-the-art training center and a “daycare” lounge with rest areaas, yoga lessons and German course for foreign players.
The first to go were the Buddha statues from the roof of the center. Neither Luca Toni nor Franck Ribery seem capable of speaking basic German, and after doing away with hotel stays on the eve of a match, Klinsmann took his team into seclusion before the last two games.
Nothing seems to have worked yet.