Was this necessary? It really wasn’t that sensitive. It was raining, it was bitterly cold, and the game had long been decided, but Bastian Dankert had obviously taken a liking to what SpVgg Greuther Fürth and TSG Hoffenheim had shown him for 90 minutes. There was no reason to drag the game out, but thanks to his office as referee, Dankert ordered stoppage time of three minutes – and only then put an end to the game when he too had to realize that it would probably be nothing would. With a tenth goal.
When it was over, you had to look twice at the scoreboard in the Fürth stadium. There was actually a result that looked like corner kick statistics, but was in fact the final score. The Fürth had lost 3: 6, it was their eleventh defeat in a row, that is a new low point in almost six decades of the Bundesliga. A top division has never lost eleven games in a row.
“I’m really pissed off,” says coach Stefan Leitl
Sitting in the media room half an hour after the game, Timothy Tillman said, “It’s a tough time for all of us.” Fürth’s midfielder had made it 2-2 at the beginning of the second half, but then the game slipped so badly that coach Stefan Leitl openly admitted: “I’m really pissed off. If you make so many individual mistakes, you have to live that you get six. “
His team had entered the game as the bottom of the table but had decided not to give anything for an hour to being bottom of the table. But then the Fürth defenders almost looked as if they had suddenly been called up onto the stage at a party. They didn’t even know what to do up there, they didn’t have anything off the cuff to score points with the audience. There were only 3385 people who wanted to see something that Saturday afternoon – but there were too many to just turn around and leave.
The people of Fürth don’t lose on purpose. You just notice: Hoffenheim is not Heidenheim
Fürth’s defenders stayed so out of necessity and tried to make the best of the situation, but in the end they snuck to the fan curve, clapped their hands briefly and then turned towards the cabin. The Fürth fans also took the debacle with composure. They applauded and sang about their team, and that’s what is particularly important to those responsible in Fürth: that people stay with themselves, especially in the hour of defeat. That they don’t let their frustration run free even if they would like to send the players to where the clover grows.
The people of Fürth don’t do all this on purpose. They try hard, they leave no stone unturned, but they keep finding out the hard way that Hoffenheim is something different from Heidenheim.
“Even if we have lost eleven games now, we just have to look ahead.” Tillman also said this sentence on Saturday in the media room. What he did not say, however: how to do this after all the low blows in recent weeks. Where should someone who has just lost for the eleventh time get the belief that he will not lose another twelfth time next week? Isn’t it like that at some point you get used to losing?
“It doesn’t matter what happened, there is nothing we can do about it now,” said Tillman, sounding combative before he drew a comparison with Mainz 05. Last season, the FSV only scored seven points in the first 17 games, but then saved themselves with a second half of the season in which only four teams were even more successful.
The example shows, said Tillman, that nothing is lost yet. The only problem is: Fürth is still six points missing to get to seven – and the last four opponents in the preliminary round are Bayer Leverkusen, Union Berlin, Borussia Mönchengladbach and FC Augsburg.
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