Under new coach Florian Kohfeldt, VfL Wolfsburg have won three times in a row. After recent weak performances and mixed results, the goal on Saturday against Borusia Dortmund is to return to the recipe for success.
The bare facts read well. VfL Wolfsburg are 6th in the league and just one point behind the Champions League places, plus progress in the top flight is in their own hands ahead of their final group game on 8 December against OSC Lille. A win and the Lower Saxons will be in the last 16 of this competition for the second time in the club’s history. Sporting director Marcel Schäfer can justifiably claim: “We are still on a good path.”
It is in the nature of things that it sometimes gets a bit rocky on this path to becoming a permanent national top force and a permanent representative on the international stage. The DFB Cup exit in the first round at regional league team Preußen Münster after an embarrassing changeover error and the early admission that they had been wrong in their search for a coach in Mark van Bommel are part of that. Now the focus is on the development under his successor Florian Kohfeldt.
The balance is still missing
And the question is how VfL will manage to remain defensively stable under the 39-year-old and still create far more danger offensively than they have recently. In the past games against Augsburg (1:0), in Bielefeld (2:2) and Sevilla (0:2), there were more phases of play that left question marks than minutes in which it became visible how Kohfeldt envisages this. The coach, who had no summer preparation with his team and could hardly transport any content on the training pitch due to the English weeks and international trips, must inevitably be patient with his team’s progress. The important thing now, he says, is to increase the likelihood of good results. “We will look at the first week in particular.”
Stability and intensity, those were the watchwords of Kohfeldt’s first days in Wolfsburg, and his switch to a 3-4-3 formation brought the hoped-for effect. “We have to find the keys we had there again as quickly as possible and not think so much about how we develop,” Kohfeldt stressed, referring to the order he set out when he took office at the end of October. “The most important thing is still that we get the intensity and stability against the ball right. That is something that is deeply ingrained in this team.” At the same time, he is in the process of “bringing offensive solutions into this team”. So far, that has been too seldom successful. And it is an indication that valuable time was wasted under van Bommel in preparation and in the first few weeks of the season.
The most important thing is still to get the intensity and stability against the ball right.
With 14 goals in twelve games, VfL are in the bottom third of the table in terms of scoring, and that needs to improve. “I don’t like that either,” says Kohfeldt, who feels that phases like last weekend in Bielefeld, when his team almost turned a 2-0 deficit into a victory, also give him the confidence that his team has that offensive spirit. He needs to tease that out more consistently without losing defensive control.
The best time to do this is on Saturday against Borussia Dortmund. With a win, VfL can reduce the gap to BVB to four points. The defeat in Sevilla, Kohfeldt believes, will not leave a mark. “There is no reason to hang our heads.” Despite all the problems, VfL is simply too good for that.
