Managing To Not Be Embarrassing

By: Abby | August 11th, 2008

To say that Hertha have a poor record in the DFB-Pokal is perhaps an understatement. They’re not known for doing well in it, often going out quite early to lower-level opposition. Last season, one might recall, it was Wuppertaler SV Borussia. Although that was in October, so there’s still time to embarrass ourselves.

Anyway! This time we didn’t, taking care of Eintracht Trier without too many problems. Several players were missing- Josip Simunic is suspended from his last DFB-Pokal game where he got red-carded, Arne Friedrich has back issues, Pal Dardai has a torn muscle, and Gojko Kacar is, for the moment, still at the Olympics. New boy Amine Chermiti started on the bench.

Marko Pantelic opened the scoring in the eight minute, but slack defending on a corner let Trier equalize. The half ended with the scores at 1-1, but after the hour mark little Swiss midfielder Fabian Lustenberger put Hertha in the lead again, and in the 81st minute Patrick Ebert headed in a cross from new boy Nicu (who seems quite handly) to make the score fairly respectable for us. Chermiti got his debut as well, coming in at the 83rd minute.

But we can’t linger on Trier. Thursday already we’re in action again, up against NK Interblock Ljubljana of Slovenia, who seem to have a new manager. I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or not- on the one hand, it means they’re doing poorly, on the other hand, teams tend to play better with new managers, and his first game will be Thursday.

And then, Sunday (we’re busy!), the league starts. It’s upon us again and I’m super-excited. The first game is away to a different Eintracht- this time, Frankfurt. I’ll have a bigger preview when we get close to it.

The question is going to be whether we have Gojko Kacar with us, or not. When we last left the story, we’d agreed to let the young Serbian stay in China provided that Serbia’s federation met certain conditions regarding insurance and salary. Apparently, they didn’t, and we’ve demanded him back.

It’s not the most pleasant situation, but compared to other clubs we’ve been positively genteel. And it seems as if he’s on his way back, maybe. We’ve bought him a ticket back to Berlin, at least, and as it seems he’s always gone with the rulings on this, there’s a good chance of seeing him on Sunday.

I’ll keep you updated.