Learning from the big ones

By: Anna | August 12th, 2008

First Jens Lehmann moved from London to Stuttgart, then Arsenal dropped by for a test match, and now the influence from the island shows in new training methods: Armin Veh will only let the players train once a day, as opposed to two training units per day as before. “Arsene Wenger does the same with Arsenal”, he says.

The idea is to extend training time and spend two, three hours on the place, without the players rushing home for lunch in-between and having to warm up twice a day.

“Effectively, we’ll have more training minutes per day”, is Veh’s reason to change the schedule.

Now, I don’t know if the new plan was used last week already, but either way, the team was, as expected, successful in the DFB Cup against Hansa Lüneburg. The VfB, playing without the injured Bastürk, Boulahrouz and Cacau, and Jan Simak, who had been red-carded in the last cup match with Carl Zeiss Jena and been banned for one match, started into the match eagerly, making it clear that losing was not an option. The quick 1:0 (Lanig, in minute 11) and the 2:0 by Hilbert, scored in the 26th minute, pointed in the right direction. However, in the first half it seemed as if Mario Gomez was in just the same shape as during the Euro: he missed a few ‘100 percent’ chances, one of which was the carbon copy of the missed chance against Austria that started the whole misery.

The second half-time started just like the first had ended, with a missed chance by Gomez (Armin Veh’s comment later: “Well, I have to admit it looked a little funny at some moments”). Every failed move was commented by the audience with cheering and ironic applause, but with two goals (58th and 79th minute) he showed that “nobody needs to worry about me”, as he said after the match. He may not be fully back to the shape of the footballer of the year 2007, but he’s on the way there.

The 5:0 (final result) then came as an own goal by Berger.

Next on the plan is the UEFA Cup qualification match against ETO Györ on Thursday. After the first Bundesliga match on Sunday, the players who have been called up for the national team squad are going to leave for the weekend.

Together with Thomas Hitzlsperger and Mario Gomez, Serdar Tasci is going to travel to Nuremberg. It’s not the first time he’s been called up, but until now he was injured every time he should have put on the DFB jersey. But now, he’s in great shape, even started training a whole week before his colleagues and is looking forward to the experience.

One player who is not going to join the team is Jens Lehmann, who now officially retired from the national team. I’m not going to get too detailed here, since Angela already wrote a piece about his decision at the world cup blog.

On a completely different note, what had been expected for months now finally happened, and Christian Gentner’s loan contract with the VfL Wolfsburg has been dissolved and he’s going to stay with the Wolves until 2010. I’ve never been happy with him leaving in the first place, but even I am forced to admit that for his career, it was the best decision, and that Stuttgart has enough midfielders to get along without him (if we aren’t struck by a flood of injuries, like last season, that is).