The God of Football Starts With Passive Skills-Chapter 185 - 57: The Secret Weapon Worked! No Dark Horses in the Second Half of the Bundesliga

Chapter 185: Chapter 57: The Secret Weapon Worked! No Dark Horses in the Second Half of the Bundesliga

When the two-week international break ended and the Mainz players on national duty returned to Bruch Road Stadium, they found their head coach’s full beard looking like a cactus freshly plucked from a shrub.

Coarse and hard!

Prickly!

The look on his face was like that of a guy who’d just run into his ex-girlfriend’s wedding photoshoot.

So, from the moment they stepped into the locker room, everyone tiptoed around, their movements light and gentle. They were afraid of making the slightest noise; even their Breathing became unusually cautious.

Wang Shuo sensed the atmosphere and wanted to laugh, but he couldn’t bring himself to.

You really couldn’t blame Klopp for pulling such a long face.

After going five matches without a victory, Mainz had clawed their way to a three-game winning streak, finally managing to recover some morale.

And now, the two-week international break had slammed the brakes on their momentum.

And that wasn’t all.

The national teams of Mainz’s players—Hungary, Macedonia, and Black Mountain, among others—were hardly powerhouses.

Weren’t the international matches just a form of torture for them?

Macedonia just had to go looking for a beating on the damn British turf, getting thrashed 0-4 by England.

As the starting center-back, how was Nowitzki supposed to feel about that?

Whatever little confidence he had managed to regain was completely shattered.

Not to mention, the players were already exhausted from the travel and back-to-back matches. Now, things were even worse.

But there was nothing to be done. The schedule waits for no one.

For matchday 26 of the Bundesliga, Mainz hosted Bayer Leverkusen.

At Bruch Road Stadium, Mainz was completely dominated by their opponents for the entire match.

Labbadia’s team applied pressure from the very first minute.

They practically pinned Mainz down, leaving them unable to make a move.

Wang Shuo was isolated up front, but he couldn’t get any real opportunities.

However, there was one thing Mainz did do well.

Their defense.

Though they were on the back foot and forced to defend in their own half, their defensive organization was solid, and the players fought desperately.

They managed to drag things out to a 0-0 draw by halftime.

But things took a turn for the worse in the second half.

Labbadia made a double substitution in the 63rd minute.

Tony Kroos and Renato Augusto came on simultaneously.

Just three minutes later, it was Tony Kroos who, from the left flank, sent a diagonal cross into the box with his right foot. Nowitzki committed a foul on Kiesling while challenging for the header, and a penalty was awarded.

Helmes coolly converted the penalty, opening the scoring for Bayer Leverkusen!

A mere nine minutes later, Rolfes delivered a brilliant pass. Inside the box, Kiesling muscled past Bungert and found the net again for Bayer Leverkusen.

In the end, Mainz lost 0-2 at home to the Pharmacy.

It was a complete and utter defeat!

From the run of play and the flow of the game to the final score, Mainz was crushed on all fronts.

In the first meeting between the two sides, Wang Shuo had put in an excellent performance with a goal and an assist.

But this time, lacking support from his teammates and being heavily marked by the opposition, he could do little to reverse the team’s overall slump.

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The moment the final whistle blew, Bruno Labbadia, standing in front of the visitors’ technical area, let out a heavy sigh of relief.

’Finally, another win!’

Since the winter break, Bayer Leverkusen had been in a terrible situation at the start of the second half of the season.

The Pharmacy, who had been brilliant in the first half of the season, had only managed one win in the first eight matches of the second half.

One win, three draws, and four losses.

Interestingly, that one win was a 4-1 away victory over Hoffenheim.

Both were newly promoted teams, and both were away games.

Labbadia felt he had finally gotten his revenge for last season’s defeat to Fiat in the 2nd Bundesliga.

He couldn’t help but chuckle when he saw the bushy-bearded Klopp walking over to shake his hand, face sullen with frustration. This, in turn, only infuriated Klopp further.

The two renowned young German coaches exchanged a perfunctory handshake before Klopp turned and walked away without saying a single word.

’How rude!’

Labbadia glanced at his right palm, as if Klopp’s awkwardness still lingered there.

But in the next moment, as Labbadia walked to the sideline to greet his players coming off the pitch, he could sense that the Bayer Leverkusen squad’s morale hadn’t seen much of a boost.

It was a victory!

But in truth, Bayer Leverkusen had only posed a real threat during that brief ten-minute spell. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

The dual-striker partnership of Kiesling and Helmes seemed to have completely lost the fire they had in the first half of the season; they were no longer as sharp.

Labbadia had spoken with his two forwards, asking them what exactly had gone wrong.

He wasn’t satisfied with their answers.

Both strikers felt they were being tasked with too much running and too many defensive responsibilities.

Labbadia tried to explain, going into great detail about the advanced nature of his intricate tactical system.

’As for the forwards having to run more, isn’t that perfectly normal?’

’Look at the top teams in the standings. Which of them has forwards who don’t run a lot?’

’Do table-toppers VfL Wolfsburg’s Griffith and Dzeko not run a lot?’

’Do Hoffenheim’s Ibisevic, Demba Ba, and Obasi not run a lot?’

’And don’t even get me started on Wang Shuo from Mainz, who are second in the league. His average of twelve kilometers per match is simply staggering!’

’As the team’s head coach,’ Labbadia thought, ’the players should be the ones adapting to my tactics.’

’If the tactics accommodate the players too much, the system becomes warped and loses its original structure.’

’That was also why he disliked making substitutions willy-nilly during a match.’

And when the team’s results were poor, all of this became ammunition for the media and fans to criticize him.