Tea Light in the Dark Universe: Bobby Wood at Hamburg

If the rumor about Koln is true, then he made a mistake. Modeste not in the mix means they needed a hard charging striker. Hamburg is stuck in the 80's. In a bad way.

 

Hard to turn down a club that you feel comfortable with and good money at his stage in the game. That being said.....the solution as always, is play better and good things happen.

 

Mueller cannot get healthy fast enough. Their midfield is horrible and Bobby barely has any service. One can only hope some other team shows him the money and he's gone either this winter or next summer.

 

All the above is true, but BVB is a very good team and they were never expected to take points from them.

 

It will have to be some other team. Hamburg's principal backer has had enough, announcing that he will not put any more money into the club, as the amount of finance required to compete in the modern game is "frightening." That means no midfield replacements in winter and, as their only really saleable asset, Bobby may have to be sold in the summer to balance the books.

 

Then currently everyone right now would be complaining about where FC Koln is in the current standings after 5 games played...

 

Hamburg is ranked 11/18 right now. Koln has 0 points; Werder has 2 points; Mainz and Freiburg are stuck on 3 points. As bad as they look, it is too early to panic.

 

They looked even worse this time last year. 6 points out of 5 games... 2 - 3 (with two of the losses coming against the CL teams) is not the end of the world. It is a long season. Any talk of the 2. Bundesliga is extremely premature.

 

They're the Sunderland of the Bundesliga, everybody wants them to get flushed out already, dangit, but they keep popping back. One day their luck will run out, though.

 

The Dortmund game apart, they haven't been playing too badly (emphasis on too) but the attack is utterly toothless. With Bobby's aggression and movement up top, they'd at least have the other sides defending a bit more, and Koln's midfield could play a little, and Bobby could start scoring.

A crappy defence is about better organization: change players, formation and tactics, and play on the counter. An uncreative midfield with nothing in front of them is a much tougher problem.

 

I think Köln being atrocious in attack was fairly expected having shipped Modeste off to China and replacing him with a homeless man's version in Cordoba. Their attack would have been more dangerous with a fast, athletic forward like Wood playing off Osako, an excellent facilitating CF who had some decent chemistry with Bobby in the few times they lined up together at 1860. Otherwise the lack of technical talent there was evident last season.

 

I didn't know Osako & Wood had played together at 1860. Wood would have cost a bit less than they will end up getting for Modeste, and the difference could have gone a long way to picking up another player for depth, in defence or up top.

And Bobby playing in front of/alongside of a good No.10 & both of them in front of a half-decent midfield is a dream

 

In the starting XI vs. Bayer 04:

Unsere Start11 für #B04HSV:
Mathenia, Diekmeier, Mavraj, Wood, Holtby, Papa, Hahn, Walace, Salihovic, Sakai und Jung. #nurderHSV pic.twitter.com/P5uWJELFkY

— Hamburger SV (@HSV) September 24, 2017

 

Holy shit, dude, we ********ing get it.

 

To be fair Wood has scored for Hamburg. Like once every 4 games. Jozy scored like once every 30 games.

 

Not even 25 minutes gone and they're 2-0 down, after looking quite comfortable. Now the heads are down and they've retreated to their own half, leaving Bobby and the Bosnian to do, erm, something, anything, on their own . @Suyuntuy was laying it on pretty thick, but it was the truth.

Bobby is doing what he does, putting himself about and trying stuff on his own. Because Leverkusen have a lousy defence, it might work, but that's the only reason for trying.

You'd feel sorry for him and the Greek CB. Fighters both, they could do something if the rest of the team had half their bottle.

 

Interesting watching the younger Concacaf attacker Leon Bailey for Bayer. He has looked excellent. Jamaica has themselves a player by the looks of it (though he has not played for the senior team yet).

 

Good. Because, as the English say, some folks are just thick.

Beyond the lack of service, though, let's not pretend Bobby is not part of the problem. He's just not very good.

 

it must suck as a forward to have to go like 10 games without a goal. And that's seen as normal due to the team they play on.

 

i remember reading he wanted to play for Belgium

 

How can a big team like Hamburg with a large fan base, big city and presumably large revenue be so shit?

 

I just don't understand as a coach, how you can completely abandon any attacking ambition. Hamburg now looks like a team that doesn't want the ball and when it has the ball doesn't want to build at all. I don't see Gisdol surviving the season...after 2 wins to start they're already down to 15th in the table.

 

Is there a single striker left in the professional game who isn't? It's a fundamental part of training apparently, feel comtact while in a good spot on the field, go down and grab something.
FWIW, it wasn't always so

 

From a good NYT piece on the club: Things have not always been this dire. Hamburg, which has played in Germany’s top tier since the modern incarnation of the club was formed in 1919, has captured six domestic league titles over all, and three German Cups. It won the European Cup in 1983, in the midst of a golden era that ran from the mid-1970s to the mid-80s.
It's a really poorly run club, that's how. Hamburg metro is right with Berlin at about 5 million (city is much smaller, but as we tend to count metro areas in the US, think midway between Atlanta and Boston).

 

In part it's because Hamburg chose to remain pure as an EV instead of as a company:

"At the time of writing, there are only six Bundesliga clubs that still operate under the traditional German club structure: Augsburg, Mainz, Schalke, Nuernberg, Stuttgart and Hamburg. The others have turned their professional football arm into companies. While the exact model varies from club to club, they are all businesses run by businessmen."

The direct democracy system keeps too much power in the hands of the thousands of members, taking it away from the board. In short, no sugar daddy can take control, which is good in that the fans have the final voice, but bad in that no one is going to come with a lot of money if they don't have much control.

So they've been trying to change it.