Letting the expert speak

By: Anna | July 28th, 2008

As a club’s own website is not always the most reliable source for un-biased information (see the comments to my latest post) and I didn’t have the chance to form my own opinion about Stuttgart’s performance yesterday, I’ll leave the comments to someone who is slightly more honest about the match: Ludovic Magnin (apologies for the picture, I just had to).

One sentence that he said in the post match interview seems to nail it: “It takes two teams to play a match, and they definitely weren’t playing football.”

He adds, “They were only defending, and while we had more ball posession and one, two chances, we didn’t use them. That kind of match is always hard to play.”

Nevertheless, after 120 minutes which probably made Mario Gomez, who was watching on the tribunes, stifle more than the one yawn that was caught on camera, a beautiful free kick goal by Jan Simak and two goals from Ciprian Marica, who might show this season that he hasn’t forgotten how to score goals, Stuttgart is through to the second qualification round for the UEFA-Cup. Magnin, by the way, also knows that Cipri only scored twice because “we’ve been training together for the last two weeks. He learned everything from me.”

The opponent for the next round will drawn on Friday.

While the fans should have been if not by the match itself, at least be pleased by the result, one event caused protest among the audience: When the players went to the curve to celebrate with their fans, they didn’t get the expected cheering, but were booed out and partly even insulted. The reason? Danijel Ljuboja, who hadn’t even played, had come with the team.

The fans still haven’t forgiven him the contract stunt from two years ago. The by now inevitable comment of Horst Heldt: “It’s an impertinence what a few fans dared to do there. The team wanted to say thank you and was booed. Ljuboja is a part of the team, and the players’ reaction [leaving the pitch without any more celebration] was absolutely correct.”

Now, I do agree with him to a certain degree, and I think even Ljubo deserves at least a new chance to prove that he changed. But still I can’t help but shake my head at Heldt’s comment since the situation reminds so much of the goalkeeper problem of last season, when somehow neither coach nor management said anything supportive about Schäfer until it was too late.