Even long after the final whistle of the game against SC Paderborn, many 1. FC Köln fans didn’t stop creating a good atmosphere on Friday evening. While individual FC players were already making their way home, people were still standing in the south curve and, with their united voices, encouraged the club management to take action – namely to throw out the sports director Christian Keller, who not only the supporters in the fan block were responsible for the sport decline of the club and the current negative development.
Witnessing the 2-1 defeat against Paderborn gave the majority of stadium visitors a 90-plus-four-minute passion play. The fact that SCP coach Lukas Kwasniok later spoke with great confidence about his team’s “absolutely deserved victory” was the truth and nothing but the truth – and the Paderborn team hadn’t even played particularly well. A few clever tricks from the coach were enough to paralyze the FC. The cleverest of the clever maneuvers: After Cologne’s opening goal (66th minute), Kwasniok changed the entire attack fleet, which gave his 34-year-old veteran Sven Michel, who scored both late goals (76th/80th), a big appearance.
The people of Cologne, on the other hand, are as harmless as the rabbits that live in the park at the Geißbockheim clubhouse. If you had wanted to have a conversation about FC’s scoring chances after the game, it would have been a very short dialogue. They would have kept quiet. The home team didn’t have a single serious chance to score. The opening goal resulted from a scene in which Jan Thielmann, from twenty meters, hit the ball back to where it came from – out of the crowd in the Paderborn penalty area. A nice goal, but also a chance goal.
Gerhard Struber, the Cologne coach, used the moment of happiness to interpret it as part of a planned success model: his team was heading for a 1-0 win, “where no one asks afterwards how you got the three points”. The sentence was apparently intended to promise that the Cologne wasteland on the pitch was part of the coach’s concept for a work victory. But that was just an attempt to gloss over the substantial problems in Cologne’s stagnating game. After the experience of the 1:5 debacle in Darmstadt, Struber ordered the defense to be strengthened – and thus ensured an offensive standstill. You “repeatedly fell into passivity. There was little going on today,” summarized Cologne captain Timo Hübers.
The audience, which was still forgiving after the relegation, becomes impatient and angry
If the old farmer’s wisdom is correct that after ten match days there has been enough evidence to draw the first preliminary balance of the season, then the conclusion in Cologne is worrying: with twelve out of a possible 30 points, FC is in a position in the table that will last a long time length of stay in the second class can be concluded. As a precaution, sports director Keller pointed out that they had never claimed that promotion had to be successful straight away: “We knew how difficult that would be.” The goal in the summer was therefore “as quickly as possible promotion”. Sounds suspiciously like Hamburger SV’s strategy. Or according to the guarantee that the sign in the pub promises: “Free beer tomorrow”.
The audience is not in the mood for semantic differentiation. It becomes impatient and angry. After the low mood in May, which was capable of sweeping away not only the manager but also the entire board of directors, Keller brought calm by keeping the first division team together – including by financially upgrading the players’ contracts. Important professionals such as Eric Martel, Thielmann and Hübers committed to FC, and the highly sought-after Denis Huseinbasic extended his contract. The Cologne staff, like the season’s budget, is first-class compared to the league, but the level of performances has been steadily declining for weeks, which leads to the typical question of the season: the coaching question.
In the case of Gerhard Struber, who has so far presented himself as a monothematic representative of the Red Bull or against-the-ball school, the manager question also arises. If Struber has to go, then Keller will also have to go, it is said in more or less initiated circles. Especially since the manager has largely concentrated the sovereignty of opinion in the club and the decision-making power on himself during his two and a half years of service, which is why he can now also be considered liable. Rumors of an offer to resign from his side circulated over the weekend, but have not been confirmed. However, something revolutionary can happen at any time in Geißbockheim.
Against this background, Keller’s support for Struber stands out in a special light. The personal mistakes of the defensive players that led to the goals conceded against Paderborn – captain Hübers in particular – “no coach in the world could prevent,” argued Keller on Friday evening. “The coach is doing a good job,” he continued. Struber himself currently has nothing more to offer than originally formulated appeals for commonality (“we have to take each other by the nose and stretch ourselves”), but his analysis of the current situation describes the Cologne dilemma clearly and accurately: “The claim in this FC- “The world is very, very high – and at the same time there is reality.”
