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"Keeping up in the league wouldn't be a sensation for me": Bielefeld's coach Uwe Neuhaus
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pmk / imago images / pmk
On a Thursday in September, Uwe Neuhaus is sitting on a wobbly wooden bench on Arminia Bielefeld's training grounds and blinking away doubts like others do the low late summer sun.
Neuhaus, 60, wears short sports trousers with his training sweater, and when he thinks his forehead wrinkles.
He can do it impressively.
There are only a few days left until the first competitive game in the DFB Cup and a little more than a week until the first Bundesliga match with Arminia Bielefeld in over eleven years.
"Keeping up the league would not be a sensation for me," Neuhaus told SPIEGEL.
Little did he suspect that his team would play in the cup a few days later as if they wanted to prove the opposite to their coach.
Until then, Arminia had not lost a single out of 16 competitive games this year, the series lasted 256 days - and it came to an end in the place Neuhaus once called home: 0: 1 at the regional division Rot-Weiss Essen, the end in round one.
How does Bielefeld deal with the "insolence"?
Neuhaus comes from Hattingen in the southern part of the Ruhr area, from there it's less than 25 kilometers to Hafenstrasse in Essen, the home of RWE.
There he was first a player and later a coach; he lived in Essen for twenty years.
And now that. Later Neuhaus will say that the performance of his team in the first 45 minutes was "an insolence".
Neuhaus has been a coach in Bielefeld since December 2018, so far it has been an extremely successful collaboration, crowned by promotion to the Bundesliga.
The loss to Essen came unexpectedly, and the question now is what will you do with it in Bielefeld?
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This is what it often looked like last season: Cheering Bielefeld players
Photo:
Thomas F. Starke / Bongarts / Getty Images
In the 2nd division Arminia had the best defense and the best offensive last season, they played a decent football in 4-3-3, courageously and with flat short passes.
Neuhaus would like to hold on to it in principle, even if the opponents will be Bayern Munich or Borussia Dortmund in the future.
He says, "We never want to hit the ball forward for long just to have a few seconds of rest in the back."
Over 300 games as a coach in the 2nd division
Neuhaus was once an assistant coach at BVB for six years, and in 2002 he became the champion at the side of coach Matthias Sammer.
Neuhaus later coached traditional clubs such as RWE, Union Berlin and Dynamo Dresden, with all three clubs he rose to the 2nd division, where he was on the sidelines in over 300 games.
But if the coaching jobs were awarded in the Bundesliga, it was never to Uwe Neuhaus.
Why not?
It is a question Neuhaus would like to think about first.
He frowns, then says, "I don't know."
Instead, he prefers to talk about coaches who always appear in the stadiums where the job of another trainer is in danger.
For him, says Neuhaus, that's nothing.
He never did, he never will.
"Then I'd rather work as an electrician again."
Neuhaus actually trained as an electrician in the steel foundry Henrichshütte, he repaired helicopters for the German armed forces and once he almost became a prison guard.
Then, says Neuhaus, he noticed just in time, "that the job leaves too many scars that I don't want to have. You have to be born to put it all away.
Setbacks are planned
At the moment of the greatest success of his career, when Bielefeld could no longer take the ascent in June and all the East Westphalian years of suffering and the relegations and near-bankruptcies were suddenly very far away, Neuhaus even forgot his self-imposed reluctance towards the media.
When a reporter from a television station indicated to the players that the coach definitely deserved a beer shower, Neuhaus said: "Hey, boy, I'll get you down there right away, and then you'll be right in the middle of it all."
In the Bundesliga, Arminia Bielefeld will hardly end the season with only two defeats as before in the second division.
There will certainly be setbacks, says Neuhaus on that Thursday in September, a few days before the end of the cup.
The only question is how to deal with it.
"Can we manage to come to terms with defeats and then tick them off - without being unfaithful to ourselves?"
At this point, Neuhaus will not have expected that this question will concern him before the first league game at Eintracht Frankfurt.
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