So This Is Goodbye

By: Abby | September 28th, 2009

My mother once told me, when I was new to following football and indeed any sport, that your team will always break your heart. They will always lose. Your favorite player will always get sold, traded, or disappoint you some other way. The management will always do something to anger you. Your moments of happiness will be fleeting. (My mother is a Mets fan.)

Lucien Favre and I started with Hertha at about the same time. My first game in the Olympiastadion was his as well, an unexpected 3-1 defeat of reigning champions VfB Stuttgart. I was in Berlin after graduating college, ostensibly working on my German. He was still an unknown, a question mark from the Swiss league, tasked to take over a falling-apart squad for a team that had delusions of grandeur despite their more grey-mouse status.

In the past two years, away from Berlin with deteriorating German, it’s been Favre that I’ve latched onto. Hertha, as I said yesterday, are not the easiest of teams to love, which has been a problem for them at least since the start of the Bundesliga if not earlier. The team were somewhat ragtag, the biggest star a diva of a striker who scored goals well and knew it. But Favre, Favre, he was someone I could like, a football teacher with a clear concept of the game and the intelligence to communicate it. He was the type of manager I have always liked.

And he’d done so well, taking a team widely tipped for relegation first to a solid tenth-place finish, then to a fantastic season that still defies description. With most of the same squad, but with the useful addition of an unwanted at Liverpool Andriy Voronin and a few shrewd pickups in the transfer windows of summer and January, Hertha climbed the table. And climbed. And climbed. Through team spirit, hard work, and a bit of luck, Hertha were serious title challengers for a time before finishing fourth and barely missing out on those mythical Champions League millions.

It’s too easy to say last season’s success is why Lucien Favre was sacked today, but it’s part of the reason. High expectations combined with high debt meant that not only could certain players not be kept (Liverpool is really getting great use out of Voronin, aren’t they?), but others could just leave- Josip Simunic finally played up to a level that meant someone would buy him out, and did. Their replacements need time to settle that they never got. Injuries to the increasingly important Gojko Kacar and the always important Jaroslav Drobny deprived a thin squad of what class there was. And somewhere in there, the players forgot the fight they used to have (including certain players who should know better).

The results are what they are- six losses, seven games. Four-goal deficits for the last two. Firing Lucien Favre was the obvious route to take. Do I think it’s the right one? No, not really. He’s shown he’s known what he’s doing, he’s done great things for the club, and it all feel so short-sighted to me. But it’s the Hertha way. Build something up, cock it up.

Lucien Favre will land on his feet. Some other club, hopefully for him one with money and a plan, will swoop and he’ll do a good job for them. Hertha, too, will go on. No one man is bigger than any club. Hertha will find someone new, either he’ll keep us up or he won’t (hopefully the former). I’ll move on too, eventually.

Goodbye, Lulu.