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It should be a busy birthday for Pal Dardai.
The Hungarian will be 45 years old on Tuesday, 23 of which he was in the service of Hertha BSC.
He's gone through good and bad times and knows the club inside and out.
At the moment, however, it is difficult for him to explain what is going on with the Bundesliga team that he has been training again since January 25th.
She is much better than she is standing there, but playing a lot worse than she can.
Everyone says that.
But no one knows why that is.
Therefore, Dardai had announced, he would try this week to get to the bottom of the cause.
"We have to talk," he said after the 2-0 (0-0) defeat at Borussia Dortmund.
He didn't understand the performance his team had delivered: The Berliners once again looked like a team without conviction or confidence in their own abilities.
They played as their new place in the table suggested: The “Big City Club” was overtaken by Arminia Bielefeld on Sunday and is now on the relegation place.
Slowly, fear of the descent is spreading.
For the ambitious Berliners, this would be a super GAU.
For Krzysztof Piatek (r.) Hertha paid 24 million euros, now the mostly luckless striker is in the relegation battle with the Berliners
Source: AFP / FRIEDEMANN VOGEL
"Maybe we looked too much at the table," said Dardai, who believes his players are somehow inhibited at the moment.
He identified a "blockade".
“We have to get that out of our heads.
A footballer has to be free, ”he said.
In Dortmund, Hertha tried hard to prevent goals, but didn't even try to score them.
Every effort was made to prevent the Dortmund team from coming to a conclusion.
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It even worked for a while: BVB striker Erling Haaland hardly had any contact with the ball in the first half.
But nothing went forward.
“We didn't even take a corner, not a free kick,” Dardai grumbled: “It shouldn't be that the courage is lacking.” In the end, the damage limitation strategy - not given by the coach - did not even lead to partial success: thanks to two mistakes Hertha has already suffered the 14th defeat of the season from goalkeeping veteran Rune Jarstein.
Big goals, full-bodied announcements
The type of appearance is in stark contrast to the full-bodied rhetoric of the club management.
"We want the biggest race to catch up that German and perhaps international football has ever seen," said Carsten Schmidt, the chairman of the management board, to the marketing magazine "Horizont" last week.
This is of course a fundamental requirement for the future.
The club is working on a strategy project with the aim of reaching the top national and European leaders.
In addition to investing in the team, this also includes creating a new performance culture.
The old stink should be expelled and new dynamics sparked.
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The first step is to "work your way up to the first third of the table," says Schmidt.
In the long term, Hertha wants to "represent the city throughout Germany, but also internationally in the future".
Schmidt did not mention deadlines, but it seemed intentional that the dissatisfaction with the status quo could be clearly read.
There is no lack of start-up help, but there is a lack of implementation
The only problem is: At the moment, Hertha does not even give the impression that they are even ready to catch up.
There was no lack of start-up help.
Lars Windhorst has already pumped 288.5 million euros into the club, and 85.5 million should be added by the end of the season.
Windhorst heads the investment company Tennor Holding, which has acquired 66.6 percent of the shares in Hertha since 2019.
So far, however, it has only been possible for Tennor's donors to see with a great deal of imagination that they have invested their money profitably.
The longer the relegation battle lasts, the greater their impatience could become.
This builds up pressure - pressure to which the club, which has developed a certain serenity with regard to achieving its own goals for many years, has apparently still not got used to.
In any case, Schmidt's installation at the beginning of December and his “big cleaning” 55 days later, when he took both long-time sports director Michael Preetz and trainer Bruno Labbadia on leave, noticeably changed nothing: the team is in comparable table regions, won under Dardai only four points in seven games.
Bobic confirms departure from Eintracht Frankfurt
Fredi Bobic announced that he will leave Eintracht Frankfurt at the end of the season.
The 49-year-old has been sports director at Hessen since summer 2016 and won the DFB Cup during this time.
Source: Stats Perform News
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The hopes that something will finally move with the sedate old lady are now linked to Fredi Bobic.
He is to be brought in as Managing Director Sport for the coming season and then essentially do what he has done in Frankfurt for almost five years: choose a good coach, make good transfers and finally drive the club out of fatalism.
Eintracht is still bitchy because Bobic still has a valid employment contract there.
But with money, we're talking about five million euros, that should probably be settled.
Seen in this light, the chances are not so bad that the “Goldelse” project, as the internal future planning is called, can finally begin next summer.
Only one thing must not get in the way: a descent. Preventing this is the job of Dardai, the loyal Hertha veteran. He is confident that it will succeed. In any case, the quality of the team must not fail - and it must not be the pressure. “A good player can play well under pressure, you have to show that. The guys have talent, but you don't see that in pressure situations, ”said Dardai. To convince them that they can do it, he now wants to have a lot of conversations.