For Christian Streich, duels with FC Bayern are always encounters with his own past. As a child, the coach of SC Freiburg was a big fan of the ensemble around Franz Beckenbauer and above all Gerd Müller. "The cooler people were Gladbach fans", back in the 1970s, says Streich, who celebrated Munich successes in the European Cup on his father's lap and wore a FC Bayern denim jacket as a teenager. "We are going there with a lot of joy because I just love to kick Bayern Munich," he says before the duel with the record champions on Saturday afternoon.
After almost ten years as Freiburg's head coach, he has been to Munich many times, but what is new is that the Freiburg team are playing a real top game against the league leaders. Freiburg is “no longer the small Gallic village”, said Fredi Bobic, the manager of Hertha BSC Berlin, recently when his Big City club had just been defeated by the Badeners. The sports club has the best defense in the league, is the only Bundesliga club still unbeaten and the lead over fifth place is already a comfortable six points. How is that possible?
There are simple answers to this question.
Midfielder Nicolas Höfler points out that the team was “luckier than unlucky this season”.
In the first phase of the game, hardly a player was injured, and last but not least, it is often pointed out that the core of the team has played together for years, Streich says: “There are many with us who don't run somewhere else after a year or two because they have played a few good games. ”The players know each other, the processes are internalized, but the interpersonal atmosphere in the team and their immediate environment is even more important.
Real friendships
Streich is a coach who really wants to get to know his players, who wants to know how his boys are doing, what makes them tick, what social environment they come from. “You can tell he's dealing with you,” said Vincenzo Grifo in a conversation with Focus about prank. Everyday life takes place "on a human level". This is not everyone's choice, but those who have really arrived in the group benefit from a social dynamic that can hardly arise in clubs with regularly changing management staff. Especially since the relationship between the trainer and the sports director is also unusually low. Sports directors Jochen Saier and Klemens Hartenbach come from the club's legendary football school, as do Streich and parts of his coaching team. Real friendships have emergedStreich lived with Hartenbach as a student in a shared apartment.