In terms of results, there could hardly have been a better debut for Florian Kohfeldt at VfL Wolfsburg than the 2:0 at Bayer Leverkusen on Saturday. However, the coach’s delight at the success was also mixed with a view to the fact that there is still plenty of room for improvement.
“What I thought was great was the passion that the boys brought and how we defended. It was a deserved victory, there’s no other way to put it,” Kohfeldt told Sky after the game. It was above all the second half, in which the Lower Saxons decided the game early on with a double strike within three minutes, that made the difference for Leverkusen, who seemed increasingly unsettled after falling behind.
Kohfeldt and the 2:0 as a symbol
“We weren’t completely bad in the first half either, I even thought the first 20 minutes were good. We didn’t do so many good things with the ball. I didn’t think the positional play was that good the whole game. From the counter-attack, the offensive was okay, from the positional play, honestly, not good yet. We still have a few things to do there. But that is something that will surely come with time,” the coach analysed frankly after the match. Maximilian Arnold, who scored the goal for the 2-0 final score, also sees his team in a “maturing process. We have to internalise the coach’s idea.” The midfielder added that it was not possible to say that “we will clean up everything straight away”.
Dodi Lukebakio and Paulo Otavio, who came on as second-half substitutes, were largely responsible for both Wolfsburg goals. A bit of coaching luck? “Yes,” stated the 39-year-old coach – and added in praise of the 2:0, in which Lukas Nmecha (scorer of the 1:0) and Yannick Gerhardt had failed immediately before Arnold, in the direction of his team: “The scene is a bit emblematic of the fact that we just didn’t stop. That was good.”
Kohfeldt also highlighted a few other things that had been rehearsed in the few training sessions together so far. “We have already trained tactically twice and played a new system today. The idea was to integrate as many players as possible in their best positions so that they automatically do their best, so to speak, which should always be the goal. And we wanted to defend forward and I think we did that well,” explained the former Bremen coach.
Arnold on intensity and first impression
Meanwhile, Arnold was unable to specify the extent to which Kohfeldt had already played a major part in the victory, even beyond the substitutions: “When you win 2-0 here, you say: Why not? But I think it was just the little things. We lost a bit of intensity. You could see it today, we were completely different on the pitch. Even though we changed tactics a bit: The biggest point was the intensity with which we worked against the ball, that had made us strong last year and we did it much better again today. We scored two goals at the right time. We are very happy to have taken the first step in the right direction.”
According to Arnold, Kohfeldt has also settled in well as a person at VfL: “He pushes a lot, has been very nice so far, very pleasant. But you also have to say that it was the same with the last coaches. It’s not that we had a coach who wasn’t good on the human side. But the first impression was very good and I hope he keeps it up. “
