Köln head coach channels inner Fred Flintstone, then stops making sense during press conference rant | OneFootball

A quirk in the DFL scheduling has left newly promoted Bundesliga outfit 1. FC Köln waiting until matchday five for its second home league fixture. Head coach Lukas Kwasniok’s Domstädter have still proven road warriors and massively exceeded expectations. Köln defeated Mainz away on opening day and drew Wolfsburg 3-3 before incurring their first loss of the season against RB Leipzig last week.

Kwasniok was nevertheless ecstatic to finally be headed back to the RheinEnergieStadion; the site of by far Köln’s best performance of the season. Hosting heavily-favored Freiburg on matchday two, Kwasniok’s team exploded to score four unanswered goals in an eventual 4-1 home triumph. Kwasniok found himself bursting with energy and excitement at the pre-match press conference, to the point that he stopped making sense.

At a press conference a couple of weeks ago, Kwasniok dropped a modern television reference. This time, instead of referencing on ongoing talent variety show (“Deutschland sucht den Superstar“), the 44-year-old travelled all the way back to the 1960s. Kwasniok wasn’t even close to being alive when American television stopped airing “The Flintstones” back in 1966.

In any event, Kwasniok quoted Fred Flintstone’s iconic line from the animated series’ opening segment when asked what it felt like to be preparing for just his second home match in charge of die Geißböcke. Flintstone’s triumphant yell upon hearing the full-time-whistle at his place of employment meant that he could hardly wait to head home.

The “Flintstone Frenzy” then completely went off the rails. Kwasniok tried to conjure up a metaphor involving the German word “Kür”, traditionally used to refer to freestyle sporting events such as skating, swimming, and gymnastics. To be absolutely fair to Kwasniok, he was attempting to reference a legitimate German metaphor.

To take an example from the Olympics, sports like figure-skating and gymnastics typically have the “Pflicht” (obligatory judged competition in which the participants are competing for medals) and the “Kür” (un-judged competition for which athletes can voluntarily opt to engage in free-form art) after the medals are awarded.

The German expression “Pflicht und Kür” can be applied to all sorts of different form of art, work, and everyday life. “Pflicht” (“obligation”) refers to what one must do while “Kür” (“unencumbered art”) refers to what one wants to do. The world of “Pflicht” involves meeting other people’s expectations while “Kür” allows one to simple have fun meeting one’s own.

In principle, the improvisational – yet still structured – nature of football renders the sport a perfect example of a balance between “Pflicht und Kür“. Kwasniok ended up backing himself into a corner by comparing home and away fixtures with “Pflicht und Kür“. Halfway through his rant, Kwasniok realized he could not give the impression that winning away matches weren’t important.

That’s when he stopped making sense.

“First I’d like to say ‘Yabba, Dabba, Doo!’, we’re finally headed home,” Kwasniok said. “I accepted this reality before the season started and kept track of the advantages. I think four points from three away games for a team that’s just been promoted to the Bundesliga is something we can live with in spite of the fact that we wanted more.

“We’re itching for more and it’s a great advantage to be playing at home in front of 50,000 positively crazy people.” Kwasniok continued. “You head out [onto the pitch], the hymn is sung. It’s a totally different feeling, it’s very intimate, one has the desire to show the people something. It’s different for us and the spectators.“

“We played an orderly match in Leipzig [last week], but this is free-style fun,” Kwasniok went on, before trailing off a bit. “There’s the obligation. The free-form voluntary style is the manner in which one reaches the obligation. It’s not the other way around….if everyone understands what I’m talking about. I now think that was a little bit too complex.“

“Okay,” Kwasniok continued in a desperate attempt to recover everyone (literally everyone) he had lost in the room. “When one consistently fulfills the obligation, but the free-form isn’t good, then it’s not a consistent meeting of the obligation. But one can fulfill the obligation with consistently solid free-form. Bad free-form can lead to good results but only that.”

“That was far too complicated,” Kwasniok concluded before switching to English, “Nobody’s perfect.“

GGFN | Peter Weis