Hecking makes most of hospital pass to get Mönchengladbach winning again

Even after the exploit, approval was far from unanimous. André Schubert’s rise at Borussia Mönchengladbach had been dizzying; from under-23 coach to reluctant first-team caretaker to permanent head coach. From bottom of the Bundesliga to the Champions League. He inherited a team that had lost its first five games of the 2015-16 Bundesliga season from Lucien Favre, perhaps the best coach in the division, but one that felt as if he had run out of solutions.

Schubert took that side and infused it with counterattacking zest. Gladbach won their first six league fixtures under the new man on their way to glorious recovery. Yet as they celebrated a return to the Champions League after the final home game of last season, a victory over Bayer Leverkusen (already assured of a top-three spot themselves), murmurs of dissent over Schubert’s long-term viability were reported by more than one observer.

They proved to be well-founded. Gladbach’s home form had been the bedrock of their success; they dropped just five points at Borussia-Park in 15 games under Schubert last season. This partially obscured Die Fohlen’s thorough rottenness on the road, the source of many of those doubts over Schubert. The only away game they won after October was the dead rubber at Darmstadt on the closing day of the campaign. Once the goals dried up, home form stuttered this season, capped by an alarming loss to Wolfsburg in the last game before the winter break. The wind was only ever blowing one way for Schubert.

So the start to his successor Dieter Hecking’s career at the club, composed of two straight away games, always looked like a hospital pass for the new man – especially when his debut saw his side fail to put away rock-bottom Darmstadt, led by their own new coach - a managerial novice - in Torsten Frings. For context, Die Lilien were battered 6-1 at home by Köln this week.

It looked bleak at half-time at Leverkusen on Saturday, with Gladbach two down and, in the words of Bild, “a candidate for the second tier.” It was then that Hecking, himself fired by Wolfsburg in the first half of the season, started to work his magic. Three goals in 19 minutes plucked an improbable win from the jaws of defeat, when a loss would have left Gladbach just two points off the relegation play-off place occupied by Ingolstadt.

The midfielder Christoph Kramer, returning to his former club, wasn’t shy in underlining the new man’s role after the game. “The coach has already been through every situation,” Kramer said. “He knew exactly which words we needed [to hear].” They certainly seemed to get inside the heads of Lars Stindl and Raffael, the front two so key to last season’s success and the goalscorers here.

With that said, Leverkusen’s complicity in their own downfall was undeniable. Having been buoyed by a first-ever Bundesliga strike for Jonathan Tah and Chicharito’s first league goal since October 1st, they were cruising. After the break, they were criminally casual with the ball in their own half, notably when Julian Brandt attempted a roulette in the centre of the pitch with two Gladbach players virtually on top of him. Five seconds later, Raffael’s winner was in the back of his team’s net.

Leverkusen are in the midst of their own underachievement this season, with their Champions League progress not fully able to distract from their current mooring in ninth. It was a bad day off the pitch for them too. After the local fire department banned plans for a choreography on safety grounds, some fans fired pyrotechnics from outside the stadium, falling on to the pitch on mini-parachutes. One cameraman suffered a foot injury and a steward was treated for shock.

“That’s the first and, I hope, the last time that’s happened in our stadium,” said the sporting director, Rudi Völler, vowing to catch and punish the perpetrators. The coach, Roger Schmidt, with his neat new haircut recalling the transformation of Marwood in the closing scenes of Withnail and I (and the removal of his swagger), will be anxious to cut out his talented team’s inconsistency. He has Gladbach’s recent predicament as a warning of what it could lead to.

Talking points

“We’ve had two good games and no points.” It was hard not to sympathise with Werder Bremen coach Alexander Nouri after his side were edged out by leaders Bayern Munich, seven days after an unfortunate defeat to Borussia Dortmund. They could have easily folded after coming in at half-time 2-0 down, to two goals of quite sublime quality by Arjen Robben and David Alaba. Yet the Weser tail wagged hard, with Max Kruse pulling one back with an excellent strike of his own and Bayern “nervous” in the closing stages, as Carlo Ancelotti put it afterwards. Werder now have a clutch of fixtures coming up against fellow strugglers to try and put things right, but they may well have to do it without Claudio Pizarro, who went off early in Saturday’s game with a thigh injury.

After succumbing to your first defeat of the season and getting sent off in front of the national team coach, you’d want to go home, take the ‘phone off the hook and draw the curtains, right? Hoffenheim’s Sandro Wagner, dismissed in his team’s narrow loss at RB Leipzig for a crunching challenge on Stefan Ilsanker, is made of sterner stuff, as it turns out. A figure who splits opinion in Germany to say the least, Wagner not only kept his appointment to appear on Saturday evening’s Das Aktuelle Sportstudio, but apologised profusely to Ilsanker – again, having gone back to check on and embrace his opponent immediately after receiving his red card – as well as his team-mates. It all elicited a warm round of applause from the studio audience, which included two Hoffenheim fans in the second row wearing homemade “Wagner for Germany” T-shirts.

Köln are having their best season for years and, after getting out of a recent rut of draws with that resounding win at Darmstadt, are still in seventh position but only three points behind Eintracht Frankfurt in third. Yet the mood is not quite as merry as it might be, with top scorer Anthony Modeste caught on camera punching Aytac Sulu, and the prospect of a lengthy ban looms. The coach, Peter Stöger, has claimed provocation and substituted Modeste shortly afterwards, but it might well be too late, and a suspension would hurt. Only Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang has scored more than Modeste’s 14 Bundesliga goals this season – level with Robert Lewandowski, though the Pole’s goals count for only a third of Bayern’s. Modeste’s represent more than half of Köln’s.

Dortmund are in the top four, but will start next weekend’s visit of Leipzig a whopping 11 points behind their promoted visitors after conceding a late equaliser at Mainz, having led for most of the match via an early Marco Reus goal. It was a strangely anaemic performance from Die Schwarzgelben in a game that was theirs for the taking, and whispers of unrest are getting louder. Former Dortmund defender Michael Schulz spoke for a number of fans when he told Sky after the match that “Thomas Tuchel is not Klopp. He doesn’t really fit this club.” With Bild reporting that Tuchel was unaware of the club signing Swedish wunderkind Alexander Isak until after the fact, a growing sense of distance between coach and board is at least perceived. An authoritative performance and positive result against Leipzig is badly needed to give Tuchel space to do his work.

Results: Schalke 0-1 Eintracht Frankfurt; Wolfsburg 1-2 Augsburg; Ingolstadt 3-1 Hamburg; Werder Bremen 1-2 Bayern Munich; Darmstadt 98 1-6 Köln; RB Leipzig 2-1 Hoffenheim; Bayer Leverkusen 2-3 Borussia M’gladbach; Freiburg 2-1 Hertha; Mainz 1-1 Borussia Dortmund