Captain Robert Andrich bemoaned his team’s ‘misery’ while those upstairs did little to back Xabi Alonso’s successor
“Y
ou say it best, when you say nothing at all,” was how Ronan Keating put it. Whether Erik ten Hag will choose to get over his latest breakup with a tub of ice-cream in front of a rewatch of Notting Hill is open to conjecture but if he did, the Irish singer’s lyrics dotted through the film are sure to have an added poignancy.
Ten Hag didn’t need telling that in only his second Bundesliga game in charge of Bayer Leverkusen, they and he had had a bad afternoon. Going to a diminished and depleted Werder Bremen (it is probably too early to say lowly, even though we strongly suspect that is the part of the table where they may end up spending most of their time), Die Werkself appeared to be on top of things, holding a 3-1 lead and a man advantage.
Not so. A first senior goal for the 18-year-old Karim Coulibaly, deftly poked in from just inside the six-yard box after a chaotic spell of pressure, gave the home side a wildly celebrated and barely believable leveller. As this was the last image of Ten Hag in Leverkusen, Coulibaly’s surprise intervention – he was drafted in from the under-19 team for a first start after a slew of injuries – will feel like the full stop, the moment that pushed the coach over the edge.
