It’s rarely a good sign when a coach makes his first substitution before half-time, but in this case it could have been a particularly bad one. Everything that could go wrong went wrong for SpVgg Greuther Fürth, and that’s why it was important to the stadium announcer to include this one word in his sentence. When he announced the change over the loudspeakers, he spoke of an “injury-related change”. Don’t let anyone think that Fürth’s coach Alexander Zorniger is reacting to the initial phase with the swap.
On the other hand: why actually? Didn’t everyone see that Zorniger should have made eleven changes after this initial phase?
Central defender Gideon Jung out, center forward Dennis Srbeny in: It was a final change that one might have imagined in the 66th or 76th minute, but it was made in the 26th minute – at a time when Fürth was already 0: 2 behind. And that too against 1. FC Nürnberg, in the 273rd Frankenderby, which ultimately ended with a 0:4. A result that will resonate for a long time.
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“The 0:4 will be reconciled with the name Zorniger and with the names of the players,” said Zorniger after the game and not only called it “extremely bitter”. When he was asked that the mood in the team had been good recently, even though the sense of success had already fallen by the wayside before the derby, Zorniger rumbled: “The good mood is getting to me. A good mood is the basis for dissatisfaction.”
Even before the duel with the club, the Fürth team had not won four times, and now that it was against their neighbors from Nuremberg, the SpVgg did something different than what teams usually do when they are going through a valley. Usually these teams fight and then at some point realize that things are just not going as easily for them as usual. And then, after they have fought for a while, they realize that it probably won’t be enough again and give up.
“Something like that shouldn’t happen – actually in no game, but definitely not in a derby,” says Fürth’s captain Hrgota
Things were different for the Fürth team this Sunday. The Fürths surrendered without fighting first. They simply let Nuremberg have their way for 45 minutes, giving the impression that they had asked themselves before the game: why strain and exhaust yourself when the derby defeat could be easier?
“Something like that shouldn’t happen – actually in no game, but definitely not in a derby,” said Fürth captain Branimir Hrgota after the 90 minutes, in which it only looked for a fraction of a moment as if this Frankenderby might happen even become a good Fürth story. In the 9th minute, Julian Green shot from behind and if the ball had not been blocked, it might have been 1-0 for Fürth. But well, then came the 13th minute in which Mahir Emreli made it 1-0 for Nuremberg. In the 18th minute it was Stefanos Tzimas who made it 2-0, and in the 34th minute Tzimas made it 3-0 after missing another top-class scoring opportunity.
The people of Nuremberg must have been surprised at how easy the game was for them. It really wasn’t to be expected that Fürth would allow itself to be taken by surprise like that. Or, to put it from FCN’s point of view: that the club should play such lively offensive football.
During the season so far, Miroslav Klose had been repeatedly accused of having no discernible plan, no idea how his team actually wanted to achieve success. Nuremberg’s coach didn’t go along with all the pessimism. He had admitted that it might not be so easy to see the progress “from the outside” – but he, Klose, he saw it.
You have to know: Even in his previous life as a center forward, Klose saw things that others didn’t see. For example, he recognized where there could be a space in front of the opponent’s goal that he would then have to run into in order to score a goal. This happened so often that Klose was world champion at one point, and even now, as a coach, he obviously saw something that others didn’t. In any case, the Fürth derby may have the power to serve as an awakening experience for Nuremberg. In the previous games the club had often not progressed beyond the beginning, but now, in the Fürth Ronhof, they suddenly played as if they were all of a piece. “It was a fantastic performance from my team,” said Klose, while Emreli said: “We are getting more and more used to each other. This game can now be a start.”
It actually can, because even though SpVgg still fought after the break, it didn’t turn the derby around, on the contrary: two minutes before the end, substitute Lukas Schmelzer made the final 4-0. It was the final point of a Nuremberg ceremony that had begun early on. When Tzimas celebrated his first goal in this derby, he ran to the corner flag in front of the Fürth curve and punched the air with his fists. A boxing match without an opponent that had quite symbolic significance: there was simply no one who wanted to take on the Nuremberg team that afternoon.
