SpVgg Unterhaching in front of Osnabrück: just don’t drown

Heiko Herrlich takes a turn when you ask him what gives him courage in this extremely predicament in which SpVgg Unterhaching is currently. Wonderlich then talks about SSV Jahn Regensburg, where he was sitting on the bench from January 2016 to June 2017. The team was smiled at at the time, recalls Haching’s coach: “Everyone said we didn’t have a chance in the third division.” Gornlickly takes a break of art. You can tell that he is happy to come to the punch line right away. Then he says: “In the end we made the climb.”

Almost ten years later, there are 25 points that separate Unterhaching from a direct promotion zone. The prospects of climbing into the second Bundesliga are therefore rather mediocre. But that is not the claim that you raise in the Munich suburb. And wonderful, 53, wants to go out on something else with his history anyway. He just wants to clarify: “I know what developments players can take.”

So when Wonderlish’s plan works out, his team will make so much progress in the next few weeks and months that in the end everything will be fine and Unterhaching will stay in the third division. And then, if the rescue should actually succeed, it is in a way, there is wonderful, “like climbing”. At the moment, hardly anyone put a chanterell on his team. Feest, says Haching’s coach with a view to the dark forecasts of the public, his team has already relegated, 17 games before the end of the season. But he, wonderful, is far from being part of it.

“In the end it doesn’t matter whether you drown seven, eight or ten meters under water. It is important that you have the feeling that you can make it three meters, ”says Herrlich and says: It’s now about faith. To trust. The fact that his players are convinced that they only approach the water surface meter by meter and then actually reach them.

“We have a very close relationship of trust,” says Herrlich about Sven Bender

You don’t get a German champion out of luck, says Herrlich. And it is also not bad luck if you descend at the end of a long season. So it says something that his new team is in the last place – but, thinks wonderful: it doesn’t have to stay there. Keyword Regensburg 2016/17, keyword development. The difference is, however, that it is now about a departure and not a climb that the burden on the psyche is much higher- and that this time there is significantly less time than in Regensburg. He took over the team during the winter break and was able to prepare them for at least two weeks for the second half of the season, but after the 1: 2 against Borussia Dortmund II and the 1-3 in Ingolstadt, victories are now needed. And for that, it knows that, it takes what his assistant Sven Bender once stood as a player for: will, fight, dedication.

“We have a very close relationship of trust,” says Herrlich about Bender, his former protégé at Bayer Leverkusen. In 2017 he brought him from Borussia Dortmund to the Werkelf and brought him together with his twin brother Lars under the Bayer Cross. In 2009 their paths had separated from TSV 1860 Munich. Now, in Unterhaching, it was the then short-term head coach Sven Bender, who had dropped his name in the club management when the club was looking for a successor around the turn of the year. So Bender only brought into play in a beautiful way – and then wonderfully attached great importance to knowing Bender, his former player at Leverkusen times, as an assistant at his side. It feels wonderful as “recognition” that Bender wanted to have him with him, and that was also a crucial point why he once again became head coach after almost four years.

Together they want to get the curve with Haching in the third division table cellar and start this weekend. On Sunday, the opponent is called VfL Osnabrück: the last against the penultimate, more relegation battle is not possible. The fact that the first two games were lost under his leadership has not yet driven out the confidence, on the contrary. He thinks: The 90 minutes against Osnabrück could be the turn. “It’s a huge chance for us,” he says.

A victory on Sunday and in the best of the next week at Rot-Weiss Essen, which is also on a relegation zone-who knows what dynamic will come up. Heiko Herrlich has done a football miracle, back then, almost ten years ago, when he was still on the bench in Regensburg.