Steffen Baumgart cites “bad Bratwurst luck” after latest Union Berlin loss, Rani Khedira goes into specifics | OneFootball

One week after invoking German folklore after his team lost, FC Union Berlin head coach Steffen Baumgart is at least keeping it consistently German when it comes to his team’s form crisis. The unexpected home defeat to Holstein Kiel on Sunday left the Rostock native thinking about German Bratwurst. Baumgart groused about Union drawing the “wrong end of the Wurst.”

The German phrase “der dicke Ende der Wurst” (literally “the fat side of the Bratwurst”) or the “Am falschen Ende der Wurst” (literally “at the wrong end of the Bratwurst”) isn’t intuitively difficult to translate. Most English speakers can easily infer that the idiom refers to bad luck.

Straightforward translations include to “draw the short straw”, “draw the short end of the stick” or “get shortchanged.” Baumgart felt his side hard done by in the defeat. The xG stats (Union 1.37, Holstein Kiel 1.03) lend some merit to this claim.

There is nevertheless another side to the story. When one considers the startling fact that die Eisernen sent a whopping 38 (!!) crosses into the box without creating a legitimate scoring chance from the flanks, luck doesn’t seem so relevant.

Strikers Marin Ljubicic (in the opening 45) and Andrej Ilic (in the second half), were often left alone in the box as their teammates were slow to move up. As FCU captain Rani Khedira pointed out in his post-match interview with DAZN, the Köpenick hosts too often got mired in lost midfield duels.

“We scored a lot of goals with crosses [during training this week],” Khedira said. “But we weren’t forceful or consistent enough [in the game today]. We had a lot of 50-50 duels where we didn’t get in front of the man and didn’t win.

“The situation is pretty damn serious,” Khedira also noted. “This was supposed to be an easy game, a must-win game. We have to do it [do better at home] for the fans and collect points at home.”

GGFN | Peter Weis