Important Serbians and Young Americans

By: Abby | February 12th, 2008

This weekend Marko Pantelic showed his worth to the club with two fantastic goals, and the Hertha website makes a note of it. Not only does he get a nice article, he’s also replaced Gilberto as the main image. He was the offense for the first half of the season, and it’s likely that he’ll continue to be it in the second half. He’s a fantastic striker- big, fast, with a great finishing touch, and is now joint second in the Bundesliga scoring list. And he wants more money.

Apparently he asked to start negotiating for a contract extension, only to be told that it was premature. They wanted to see how he would perform in the second half of the season, when he’s been known to dip. Now he’s a bit cranky about it. Which means the club and his agent are going to argue for a while while the press writes up a bunch of stories about where he could go (Bolton and Fulham are interested, but I’d guess another Bundesliga club is more likely). His salary is said to be at around €1.5 or €1.6 million a year, which puts him below Arne Freidrich, Josip Simunic, and formerly Gilberto.

In my completely uninformed opinion, there’s a great way to solve this- take whatever salary we saved from Gilberto’s leaving and give it to Pante. Now. He’s worth it. He deserves the money for what he is to this team right now, for his scoring rate, and for how the entire league knows he’s our entire offense and yet he still scores goals. Raffael and the new Bulgarian might be the future, but Pante is keeping us in the league right now. So please, Dieter, don’t screw this one up.

Anyway. In cheerier news, it’s reported that Hertha has signed another American youth player. Ellis McLoughlin, a U17 striker, has reportedly signed terms with Hertha and is off in Turkey with the Hertha U23 team. He won’t be able to really play until he’s 18, but it looks like he’s impressed Lulu and will be already well familiar with the team by that point. And perhaps more importantly, he’s from the Seattle area and is a University of Washington (my alma mater!) player. So it is not out of the realm of possibility that I’ve walked past him on the street without having any idea of who he was.

As far as the American teenager that’s already officially at Hertha (that’s Bryan Arguez, for those of us who haven’t been paying attention), he’ll be participating in an online chat tomorrow. It starts at 6 PM Berlin time, which is 9 AM Seattle time (and 12 noon New York time). I’m assuming it’s in German, although I have no idea how much (if any) Bryan speaks.

Also, he got a new car.