As of: January 13, 2024 12:15 p.m
The pitch was the same, so was the hotel and so was the coaching team. And yet the signs for the rest of the season are completely different if you compare the two winter training camps of the second division soccer team FC St. Pauli in Benidorm, Spain, in 2023 and 2024.
A year ago, the club had just fired Timo Schultz and appointed the then 29-year-old Fabian Hürzeler as head coach. In Benidorm he laid the foundation for a furious second half of the season, in which St. Pauli mutated from relegation to promotion candidates.
A year later, the initial skepticism of some fans towards the unknown Hürzeler has disappeared and sports director Andreas Bornemann is fighting to extend the contract with one of the most sought-after shooting stars on the German coaching market. Spoiler: This is one of the few projects that didn’t work out in Benidorm.
Further information
The expiring contract with Fabian Hürzeler is to be extended, but the coach is hesitant. The hanging game endangers Hamburg’s sporting goals. more
St. Pauli went into the winter break as undefeated second in the table and in a direct promotion spot. And yet at the end I had the feeling that I had left something behind. Three draws in a row, in which the team was the better team in each case and is therefore six points behind. Is the team running out of steam?
Detailed work on defense
Hürzeler therefore took a few big topics with him to Spain. First: to improve defensive stability. That sounds astonishing at first, as his team has by far the best defense in the second division with only 15 goals conceded. However, the calculation behind it is: If it doesn’t work out to add a second, third or fourth goal, just one has to be enough to win. The team worked on this with some attention to detail.
Further information
The two draws against HSV and Osnabrück raise the question of whether the Hamburg team won’t be tripping themselves up again in the race for promotion. more
Second topic: Plugging the Australian hole. St. Pauli’s captain Jackson Irvine will be out for several weeks. He is taking part in the Asian Championships in Qatar with the Australian national team. And if that wasn’t enough: the man who has previously represented Irvine in the event of failures is also there. Connor Metcalfe is also an Australian international. Now Hürzeler has to rebuild the important defensive center.
Smith or Kemlein – who will fill the Australian hole?
It would be possible to move Eric Smith forward from central defense. He has already played that and can do it too. The problem: The Swede is actually far too valuable in the back row – and now sees himself there more. And so St. Pauli has taken a path that is initially surprising. The club has loaned 19-year-old Aljoscha Kemlein from Union Berlin for six months.
Further information
Since Jackson Irvine and Connor Metcalfe will be missing for a long time, the second division soccer team has made improvements in the defensive midfield. more
Ambitious, because Kemlein has only made two short appearances in the Bundesliga and one in the Champions League (as a substitute against Real Madrid). In addition to a lack of match practice, he now has extremely little time to get used to St. Pauli’s demanding system and play in a key position. After his first impressions in Benidorm, striker Johannes Eggestein praised the youngster’s good understanding of the game and quick comprehension. If the plan works, sports director Andreas Bornemann could have achieved a real coup.
The question of the temporary lack of “leadership skills” due to Irvine’s absence should be neglected. With players like Nikola Vasijl, Hauke Wahl, Karol Mets, Marcel Hartel, Smith and Eggestein, the team still has more than enough players with leadership personality on the field and in the dressing room.
U17 world champion Eric da Silva Moreira is convincing
The 30-man squad in Benidorm included seven players who are considered “young talent”. Hürzeler wanted to see them long-term, test how they react to the high daily load and assess who could possibly be an alternative for the professional sector in the foreseeable future.
Eric da Silva Moreira performed surprisingly well from the group. The 17-year-old, who plays on the right wing both defensively and offensively, has just become U17 world champion with Germany. Quarrels that arose over the talent in the summer, when a possible million-dollar offer from the Bundesliga was said to have been on the table, have been resolved. Da Silva Moreira has changed his agent and is now concentrating on St. Pauli – for now.
Zoller remains the problem child
There is a crying and a laughing eye from the injured front. It’s good that only two professionals couldn’t train: Scott Banks, who is slowly building up after his cruciate ligament tear, plus – and that’s the crying eye: Simon Zoller. The striker, who had a lot of hopes when he moved to Millerntor in the summer, has been struggling with various injuries ever since. In Benidorm he worked individually with the rehabilitation trainers the entire time. Return uncertain.
Hürzeler is satisfied
Overall, the trainer was satisfied with the ten days under the sometimes more and sometimes less bright Spanish sun. He praised the professional behavior of his players, also with regard to conscientious regeneration given the high workload that he and his staff had set. “Variations for creating new spaces while maintaining the tried and tested basic order” were successfully developed, and he was very satisfied with “the courage to make mistakes and learn from them.”
Hürzeler was grateful for his players and his employees. He knows that he is privileged to receive so much support as a “passionate and partly obsessed” football teacher. Little things that underline mutual appreciation. But: Hürzeler had already said all of this before the final 3-1 defeat in the test against Osnabrück.
Test match defeat against Osnabrück as a setback
Up until the friendly, it looked as if St. Pauli had achieved their goals relatively well in the sessions. If the game against the bottom of the second division table was intended to underline that with a result, it went wrong.
Was St. Pauli the better team again? In any case. Have they managed to convert their superiority into something countable? No, not again. Did the security in the game structure work? No, the 0-1 result resulted from one of the risky maneuvers in the build-up game via the goalkeeper, which were almost never punished in the first half of the season, but are now.
Was the balance between attack and defense right? Nope. Most of the time yes, but at 0-2 a long ball was enough to leave us empty at the back. And if the bottom team scores two goals in 75 minutes and also misses a penalty, that’s not enough from St. Pauli’s point of view. Or too much, depending on your point of view. The second 75 minutes, with one goal on each side, were dominated by players from the second row and are therefore negligible.
Where will St. Pauli end up at the end of the season?
The difficult question remains about a forecast for the second half of the season. Will St. Pauli manage to reliably convert the playful superiority from most games into victories and thus regularly score three points? Nine draws from 17 games in the first half of the season are too many – just scoring points won’t be enough for the top group in the long run.
How well can the team compensate for Irvine’s absence? It’s encouraging that the team has already mastered the situation. When the captain returned injured from an international trip in the fall, the team celebrated three wins in a row without him. The catch: Metcalfe had replaced him at the time.
Further information
Results, table standings and match days at a glance. more
Has the league adapted to St. Pauli’s possession football and is weaker but efficient teams punishing the Kiezkickers like Osnabrück did in the test match? And in the end, of course, the question is: What pressure is the competition exerting in the promotion race? HSV is always a force to be reckoned with. Will the Kiel surprise team manage to stay at the top for the long term? Will Hertha BSC Berlin be able to intervene in the promotion race again with a series, as expected? And which teams are still waiting for mistakes in the top three?
St. Pauli’s big plus is that the team seems far too well-rehearsed and too stable to get off track permanently, and not just in the training camp in Benidorm. But the Bundesliga mission will not be a self-starter for a long time.
Further information
The northern football clubs in the 2nd league began preparing for the second half of the season two days after the turn of the year. The winter timetables from HSV, Hansa Rostock and Co. at a glance. more
This topic in the program:
sports club | 21.01.2024 | 10:50 p.m