TSV 1860 Munich against Hannover 96 II: The plan works

A home game like this has certain advantages. As a player, for example, you know where the changing rooms are and the shortest route out onto the pitch. You also don’t have to look for the room where you will be tested for doping afterwards. And it is just as clear where you can get something to eat after the game. Unless, of course, the coach is called Marco Antwerpen. Then it can happen that the buffet is cleared away after a defeat before the players have even helped themselves. But the coach of TSV 1860 Munich is called Argirios Giannikis. And it can’t really be said these days that the Lions are playing so well that there might be something amiss.

So it’s quite straightforward. In theory, at least. In practice, it’s obviously very complicated – after all, we’re talking about Sechzig. It had been – wait a minute, look it up – almost six months since the Lions last won a home game in the third division. It’s not a football miracle that Sechzig’s coach is still the same as he was in April, when his team beat Viktoria Köln 3-1; but it’s no surprise that Giannikis has been criticized in recent weeks.

But on Wednesday, four days after the 1-0 win at Arminia Bielefeld, Sechzig also beat Hannover 96 II 1-0, climbing into the top half of the table. “Overall, we did quite well,” said Giannikis after the game, “of course there were three or four phases in which we made mistakes, but in the end we put a lot of passion into defending the goal.”

It was not apparent in the first half that Sechzig’s coach would later describe the game as “very difficult”. Patrick Hobsch scored for the first time from a corner for the Lions, who could easily have scored more goals before the break. But after the break things changed. Hannover, bottom of the table, came on, and Sechzig did not want to welcome them like bottom of the table. Giannikis’s order was for his team to basically do what the Bambinis do, for whom no tables are even kept. Simply ignore the fact that some association lists the results and sorts the teams according to how often they have won and how often they have lost. And then just play football. Without thinking about where Hannover is doing. And without the burden of their own false start.

Verlaat also had the feeling that the longer the game went on, “it was no longer as confident.”

That’s how it was supposed to be, and that’s how it was at first. Sechzig just played and knew how to please, but then word seemed to get around on the pitch that Hannover had managed to lose as often as Sechzig in the first few weeks of the season. The bottom team caused the Lions more and more problems, Tom Sanne missed a top-class chance, and when Raphael Schifferl lost the ball in front of his own penalty area in the 70th minute and was sent off after an emergency stop, the game could have taken a turn. But it didn’t. With luck and skill, Sechzig held on to the 1-0 lead.

The first home win since April was actually achieved, and captain Jesper Verlaat said: “We made it more exciting than it should have been.” Hobsch and Schifferl could have scored earlier in the first half, but the longer the game went on, the more Verlaat got the feeling that “it was no longer as confident.” But now Sechzig is “making up for a lot with mentality,” emphasised Verlaat – and thus highlighted how the team found its way out of the crisis.

After the last two victories, we can say with a clear conscience that the situation has been defused for the time being. The Lions have worked their way out of their predicament with the basic virtues that football requires – and with the same coach who was on the bench in April. Not many people would have thought it possible until recently that Giannikis could rightly say on Wednesday evening that his team had “good phases even when in possession of the ball”. But Giannikis and his team have freed themselves.