Tactical Analysis: Did A Birthday Bash Cost Hertha Saturday?

Last Thurs­day, Lucien Favre sus­pended his right winger Patrick Ebert indef­i­nitely. While the rea­son for the sus­pen­sion is that Ebert was out until 3 AM cel­e­brat­ing his birth­day, which breaks team cur­few rules; there is a big­ger story is that dur­ing his drunken walk home (points for walk­ing), there is every indi­ca­tion that Ebert along with his Ghetto mate Kevin-Prince Boateng smashed up three autos.

The result this week­end, a 2–0 away loss to Stuttgart, would indi­cate that Ebert’s sus­pen­sion affected the team. In fact Lucien Favre seemed to point to Babic’s role (tak­ing the left wing from Nicu who cover Ebert’s spot) as being part of the prob­lem Sat­ur­day. But I don’t think this is a fair assess­ment. Ebert’s absence didn’t really cost them the game. While Stuttgart dom­i­nated the first half on Sat­ur­day and cre­ated a bevy of chances, Hertha was able to absorb the attacks and snuff them out in the final third. It’s been one of their strengths this year. Max­i­m­il­ian Nicu, mov­ing over from the left, did the work defen­sively on the right with Stein sit­ting behind him and lim­ited play in Ebert’s area. In fact, most of the chances Stuttgart cre­ated came down the cen­ter of the pitch.

So through the first half, Hertha were play­ing no dif­fer­ently than typ­i­cal and looked primed to grind out the result. How­ever, they con­ceded two early goals in the sec­ond half. Nei­ther was scored from build up. The first was a route 1 goal, that Hertha has often been accused of play­ing this year, where Lehmann took a goal kick and found Gomez who out-jumped Simu­nic and found Cacau, who slot­ted the ball home. The sec­ond was scored off a free kick given away by Rod­nei and scored by an unmarked Khedira because Hertha was too focused on Gomez. What these both had in com­mon, were the fact that they were aer­ial in nature and Arne Frei­drich had to be subbed in the 25th due to injury. Had he played the full game, these may have never led to goals.

So defen­sively it wasn’t Babic/Ebert that cost them the game, so maybe Favre meant offen­sively. How­ever, eight of his teams 12 shots came after the sec­ond goal, when he had switch from a 4–4-2 to a 4–3-3, which points to his tac­tics more than Ebert’s hatred of cars. But the argu­ment could be made that Babic and Nicu, who were the two play­ers at the cen­ter of Ebert’s absence, were subbed to make this 4–3-3. So per­haps Ebert might have allowed for more expan­sive play had he been included. No! The prob­lem before the change was that Cicero and Dar­dai were out classed by Hitzelsperger and Khedira in the mid­dle of the pitch. They saw lit­tle of the ball and weren’t able to swing it wide, which is their job. In addi­tion, Raf­fael did his best dis­ap­pear­ing act again and took away Hertha’s abil­ity to link play. There­fore they were lim­ited to loft­ing the ball to Voronin.

So rather than blam­ing this on a stu­pid, but child­ish inci­dent, Hertha fans and Favre just need to accept that it was poor tac­tics offen­sively by the trainer and bad luck on an injury to their captain.

But with Pan­telic seem­ingly ready to return, at least Hertha fans can look for­ward to see­ing Raf­fael in his best post­ing, sit­ting on the bench.

Tagged as: Arne Friedrich, Lucien Favre, Patrick Ebert