1. FC Köln couldn’t repeat their strong performance against Eintracht Frankfurt on Saturday. Coach Steffen Baumgart’s team owed a lot.
Heads went down: 1. FC Köln owed a lot in Stuttgart.
imago images
Facts speak for themselves. And often not for the person concerned. The fact was that 1. FC Köln traveled to Stuttgart in a role that they hadn’t really been able to play very often. The billy goats came to Swabia as favorites. Here’s the opponent, a club in danger of relegation with a difficult present. There 1. FC Köln with the chance to move towards seventh place, which at the end of the season may qualify for participation in international competition.
And then that, put into words by Steffen Baumgart: “Today we didn’t do a lot of things as well as we should have done to be able to win,” said Cologne’s coach, who had warned again and again that FC still is not a team that can put every opponent under pressure when called.
It wasn’t enough for VfB on Saturday, even the (partial) successes against Munich, Leipzig or Frankfurt don’t automatically make the difference. “And then,” summed up Baumgart, “you sometimes leave the pitch as a loser.” Even as a “deserved loser”, Baumgart, who is a fair loser with every fiber of his being, admitted that much.
It became apparent early on that afternoon that the people of Cologne had taken little of what had made them so strong to the capital of Baden-Württemberg. Right from the start it was missing here and there, the actions were not well thought out. When the Swabians opened the scoring, Cologne failed to do everything they normally do in terms of aggressiveness.
Jonas Hector criticized: “We defended the situations poorly. We had the opportunity to clarify the actions, but we didn’t manage to do it. We now have to analyze why that was.”
After all: The obviousness of the errors should simplify the analysis significantly. It will be more difficult to answer the question why you couldn’t get a foot on the ground against this badly limited Stuttgart team. It would be bad to look for excuses. Because this time the facts spoke clearly for themselves. And certainly not for the people of Cologne.
