New RB Leipzig manager showed his ability to muster unity and his way of absorbing what a set of players need“We need the ball and we need to control the game,” said Domenico Tedesco, summing up his plans at RB Leipzig after a first game, and a first win. If the phrase was fairly anodyne in terms of a new coach setting out his ambitions for a club that wants to continue climbing, it pricked up the ears. This was not from what many thought was the Tedesco playbook.There was a circularity, if not an inevitability, about the 36-year-old pitching up here. Not just because of his fitting the youthful outlook of the club, and not just because he was...
Serial Bundesliga champions will judge their new manager not by titles but rather a handful of European knockout matches Julian Nagelsmann is 33. This summer, he will fulfil what always seemed his destiny and become manager of Bayern Munich, the club he supported as a boy growing up in Landsberg am Lech, the Bavarian town where a young Johnny Cash was stationed with the US air force. It is a story with an almost mythic quality: the young professional suffering serious knee injuries and committing himself to coaching, emerging as the brightest talent of the dominant German school. But this is where it gets real; this is where he has to win.Nagelsmann will face the problem common to all managers...
With Liverpool stuttering, RB Leipzig’s bright young acolyte of the German press must see Tuesday’s Champions League game as a chance to claim another major scalp Football, Brian Clough used to complain, is not a world that ever lets you enjoy your success. There’s always another match, another season, another threat. The past three seasons at Liverpool have been a story of remarkable achievement: a Champions League final, then Champions League success, then the end of the 30-year league title drought. But the fireworks had barely dimmed in the sky over Anfield before Jürgen Klopp found new opponents rising against him. Related: RB Leipzig v Liverpool relocated to Budapest due to German Covid rules Continue reading...
Leipzig are moving gently towards making inroads into the current hegemony as Borussia Dortmund fail to step upThere has, for some time, been a deal of irritation in parts of Germany’s football-following community over the international marketing of Bayern Munich’s clashes with Borussia Dortmund as Der Klassiker. The epithet can’t truly pretend to be equivalent to its Spanish – or even French – counterpart, being more a way of framing Bayern versus current next best than reference to some historical struggle.That Dortmund have grown into their role in the would-be rivalry is a post-2013 Champions League construct, a natural fit with BVB’s own global appeal and their consistent pitching up just shy of throwing distance from Bayern’s windows. What repercussions...
Only 10 months after Tottenham reached the European Cup final they hit the buffers in Leipzig – it looks like a long way backSo farewell then, Tottenham. Who knows when our paths will cross again? A fixture they embarked upon with a puncher’s chance and plenty of underdog spirit ended merely in crippling defeat and more questions. A broken team that under the joyless stewardship of José Mourinho has been broken still further, they looked here exactly what they are: the eighth‑best team in the Premier League, exhausted and error-prone, bad in defence and bad in attack, with no discernible long-term strategy and no identifiable short-term plan. Related: RB Leipzig leave Lloris squirming and hurry Mourinho's stale Spurs to the...