Mirko Slomka used to be coach of Schalke before he took over a few months ago at Hannover. Despite his Bundesliga record at Schalke and having been the Schalke coach during their 07/08 CL run, I never really rated him as a coach. I liked Rangnick at Schalke and his team had the likes of Rost, Krstajic, Kobiashvili, Lincoln, Hamit Altintop and a younger Rafinha. They were good to watch from what I saw and Rangnick played a part in getting Hoffenheim in the Bundesliga. I can't say the same about Slomka. Is it to do with the players he had? Is he a more pragmatic coach than Rangnick? What makes him a good coach or not (current results at Hannover wouldn't say much)? Am I just put off by the fact that he is a German-born coach without a Germanic name?
Well he lead Schlake far in the CL, and if memory serves right he was 3rd or so in the league when he got fired, so calling him unsuccessful is wrong imo (current season notwithstanding, but I don't think Magath or Mourinho would have fared much better as coaches of 96 with the constant setbacks). I think it had to do with ambition, and with Slomka having a very different attitude towards football than what is needed at Schalke.
Slomka is actually a pretty common name in Germany) - and according to wikipedia at least 13% of all Germans have a surname of Polish origin.
In Deutschland gibt es 222 Telefonbucheinträge zum Namen Slomka und damit ca. 592 Personen mit diesem Namen.
Which means it should, by commonness, be in the upper 10% or so of names (less than 20.000 people will already get a name in the top 100, and there are supposedly 500.000 or more different last names in Germany). It's more common than Beckenbauer, for example (429 people), or Schwarzenbeck (194 people).
I'm basing this on an article in the book "Beiträge zur Lingusitik and Phonetik" (2001) on the 1000 most common last names in Germany, which had way lower numbers for names in the top 100. As names came up more than once I read it up back then, but unfortunately I don't have the article at hand. That's the book: http://books.google.de/books?id=wQN...&resnum=2&ved=0CBIQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false
Verwandt.de seems to take the number of phone book entries and multiples them by 2.X, so I guess the results vary from name to name (I can't tell you what method the linguists used anymore, though - I'm not exactly an expert and just did a bit of research because of a BigSoccer argument on player names back in the day ).
Where the name issue is concerned, Germany does have players and coaches with Polish and Turkish names. Maybe when I think of German coaches, I like to think of names like Weisweiler, Herberger, Schoen, Rehhagel and Hitzfeld. Teutonic indeed. If I really want to drag on more about the names issue, we can talk about Littbarski, Grabowski, Ozil and Marin. Not criticising them as players, they just don't have German sounding names. I think we can save it for another thread though because everyone is starting to go off at tangents and not giving an opinion of Slomka as a coach. Did the Schalke board feel that he couldn't give his players the self-belief to win the title? As for this season, Hannover's cause has been disappointing and the passing of Robert Enke hasn't helped at all. I was looking at Slomka's Schalke days because it would be harsh to judge him based on this season and the tragic circumstances.
No, Slomka let Schalke play horrible football, really, absolutely horrible. It regularly looked as if teams fighting for relegation had a better planned and executed attacking play than Schalke. As soon as our players got the ball and started attacking the game dissolved into chaos. Nobody had any idea where anybody else went, passes went into empty spaces or defenders, dribblings were lost, anybody who had the ball had seemingly two or three opponents against him with no open lanes. It was really bad. In essence his winning forumla for most of the time consisted of a very reliable defense and then Pander for the set pieces. In the end Müller bought a bunch of players in the winter break because Slomka and he decided on a new club strategy centered around playing 4-3-3 or 4-5-1. Suddenly Slomka changed the system to 4-4-2, all the new players were benched at best. Granted the playing style did improve somewhat and the players didnt look clueless anymore, but he lost more often as Pander got injured. In the end everybody was fed including Müller up so he sacked him three, four months later after a 5:1 loss to Bremen. I'm not sure how much of the blame rests on Slomka. I think he is a pretty pragmatic coach with a very sensible attitude towars modern coaching (e.g. very scientific approach, with a lot of delegation to specialists). Schalke was one of the fittest team under his spell, which was a stark contrast to Rutten in the next year. Schalke also lacked the quality in the attacking midfield and attack to play a beautiful game, but the utter lack of cohesion in the offense was really his fault. Dont know if that was intentional so that they could concentrate on other things more f.e. set pieces, but they played liked a beerleague team whenever they attacked. Schalke under Magath plays pretty much the same way as Slomka, solid defense comes first, two players in the dmid, Kuranyi upfront. Eventhough Schalke clearly doesnt play nice football, the attacks are far more organized and cohesive than with Slomka. I think thats my main problem with Slomka, the other was comparable to one of Löw's weaknesses. It looked as if Slomka did a really good job in analyzing the opponent before the match and then setting up his team accordingly. But as soon as changes where necessary he was more or less lost (I still remember a UEFA-Cup game, where Schalke needed a goal to advance. With 40! Mins remaining Lincoln was moved back as libero hoofing up balls into the box, while Bordon (and everybody else) moved into the box. For 40Mins: ball to Lincoln staying in the center of the field, ball hoofed into the box, ball cleared back to Lincoln. Jesses). Well, the third thing were his substitutions, but as far as I can see, every fan complains about their coach in that regard so I dont really deem it viable.