Twelve months have flown by - filled with highs and lows, celebrations and disappointments, departures and returns. 2011 - a year with wonderful moments but also some difficult...
Twelve months have flown by - filled with highs and lows, celebrations and disappointments, departures and returns. 2011 - a year with wonderful moments but also some difficult...
Twelve months have flown by - filled with highs and lows, celebrations and disappointments, departures and returns. 2011 - a year with wonderful moments but also some difficult times between relegation angst and dreams of fall championships. It's not easy to retain an overview of it all. That's why WERDER.DE once again is offering its Green-Whites almanac at year's end. Werder 2011 from A to Z, to remember and smile. Today: Part 3 - G to I.
The rumours popped up now and again that Arsene Wenger wanted to bring Per Mertesacker from the Weser to the Thames and Arsenal. But they then faded away just as quickly. This summer most Werder fans figured they didn't need to worry about the latest rumour of Mertesacker leaving Bremen. Then all of a sudden, everything went so fast. On 31 August, Mertesacker transferred to the Gunners in London. Merte and SV Werder were together for five years. And they had lots of success, reaching the Europa League final and winning the German Cup. The fact that the transfer was not planned in advance could be seen by head coach Thomas Schaaf naming Mertesacker to team captain shortly before that.
Will he come or not? The acquisition of Sokratis - officially back then still Sokratis Papastathopoulos - seemed to take an eternity early this summer. The first rumours of bringing in the Greek international came in early May, but Klaus Allofs could not announce the signing until the end of July. The transfer has proved worthwhile as Sokratis has developed - once he finally arrived - into one of the pillars of the Green-Whites' backline. Long and difficult negotiations with another player also paid off as Werder started talking of a transfer for Aleksandar Ignjovski in early June before finally bringing in the Serbian all-arounder two months later.
If it were up to Thomas Schaaf, then there wouldn't have been so much commotion on 30 April. "It's a birthday," said Werder's head coach in his usual unexcited manner. "And things keep going." Well, when someone turns 50, then you can talk about something special. And when 39 of those years were spent with one single football club as player and coach then it's absolutely something extraordinary. The Mannheim native has lived with and for football in Bremen since his childhood. He debuted as a 17-year-old and won two German league titles, two German DFB Cups and one European Cup Winners Cup crown as a player.
He has been head coach in Bremen for 12-and-a-half years. He also won two German Cups and one German league championship as coach. Over nearly 40 years, Schaaf has melted within Werder into a perfect composition from which others involved have profited. This is what it sounds like in the humbled language of the head coach: "I worked with people not only on the economic potential but also with my ideas. That is a very good feeling." This statement is not over-modesty but his nature. And the others can be responsible for the commotion in the next 50 years.
