Mark Fotheringham steered Hertha Berlin out of the bottom two with the club’s Covid-hit manager confined to a hotel roomIt felt as if the appointment of Felix Magath was peak Hertha. We should have known better. On the eve of the first game of the new era, at home to Champions League-chasing Hoffenheim, the new coach tested positive for Covid, and was confined to his Berlin hotel room. When it became known that Magath would be unable to take to the touchline for his projected debut with illness, it felt utterly typical of Hertha’s wretched season to date. “I thought he was joking,” said sporting director Fredi Bobic of the moment when he took Magath’s call to receive the news.Those...
Furious fans interrupted training after the cup defeat to Union Berlin in midweek and the pressure intensified on Sunday“We have to make sure,” said Hertha Berlin head coach, Tayfun Korkut, “that we put this week behind us and focus on the coming games.” A mere 109 seconds into Sunday’s game against Bayern Munich Corentin Tolisso had the ball in the Hertha net and was called for a marginal offside, and even before the midfielder eventually headed the opener it never felt like the home side were doing anything other than trying to contain the deluge in a paper cup, as Neil Finn might have said – but the coach meant more than just that. Continue reading...
It is a painful time for the ‘big city club’ from Berlin, rubbed in by a comprehensive and clear derby defeatThe difference between Germany’s two sharply contrasting capital clubs has always been clear. Now it is even more so, just not in the manner that one ever expected. Beyond bragging rights, the fifth top-flight derby between Union and Hertha underlined that one is a professional, slick outfit that knows where it is going, that one has a plan and an identity – and neither of those, it seems, is the latter club.Hertha tried to find their poise, led by Kevin-Prince Boateng, who ushered the players to the away end for communion and dialogue with some unhappy travelling supporters, post-defeat at...
In a global city where football doesn’t often take centre stage, it needed someone to seize the moment: enter the Union strikerIt was going to take something to be heard through the cacophony, to guide the way through the fog that sporadically impaired vision of proceedings, and to cut a tension that was quite unusual in the context of Berlin’s football. In a global city where football doesn’t often take centre stage, it needed something or someone to seize the moment. Sebastian Polter was ready.In this first top-flight meeting between Berlin’s two most prominent clubs, Union and Hertha, where nerves crackled and fireworks fizzed, the football had been fractious in the Bundesliga new boys’ atmospheric, old-school home, rebuilt by the...
Finishing the weekend in second, with only Bayern Munich ahead of them, will do nicely for HerthaPál Dárdai was being very careful with his words and rightly so, given his team travel to unbeaten Werder Bremen on Tuesday before hosting the frankly terrifying Bayern Munich. That is an Englische Woche and a half by anyone’s standards. “I know you’re trying to provoke,” the Hertha coach said with a wry smile to journalists prompting him to show some enthusiasm, “but the Hertha fans know me. We’ve had three years of stability – and now, we’ve a team you can really enjoy. Just stay realistic.”Even if it’s a coach’s job to be balanced, those supporters who know Dárdai so well – he...