Where’d that come from?

By: Chris | May 29th, 2008

To all that read this blog, my apologies–I’ve been on a wonderful and well-deserved holiday sans laptop for over a week.

It’s been a little more than week since HSV’s final match of the season, and sadly, of the Huub Stevens Era. Behind a hat-trick from Peruvian party-boy Paolo Guerrero, a brace from possible short-timer Ivica Olic, a penalty from VDV and a sweet long range shot from Piotr Trochowski, HSV took it to an underwhelming (and clearly uninterested/uninspired) Karlsruhe at the ‘Bank. Great match for HSV all in all, and begs the question–why haven’t HSV been able to play this way all year? A week and a half later I still can’t figure it out. All (uninjured) hands were available for the final match. A couple of noticeable absences: Atouba (Huzzah!-maybe somebody will take him off our hands!) and Vincent Kompany, who was REAAAALLLY in Huub’s doghouse. A change of managers at HSV is probably the best thing for his career right now.

With the victory, HSV secured 4th place in the B’liga table on 54 points, and with it, automatic UEFA Cup qualification. To me it’s little consolation when Hamburg were in a Champions League spot as recently as late March.

A postmortem on the season is in the works and can be summed up in 7 words: what-could-have-been, and EFF’ing-January-break. I have felt for a long time (well, since January) that the long layoff this winter really affected HSV negatively. I also think that the length of the UEFA Cup for HSV (through the Intertoto Cup qualifying, group and knockout stages) was just a whole lot of football and took its toll.

TEAM NEWS
*Paolo Guerrero is being targetted by Wigan for a transfer. I had seen Olic’s and (of course) VDV’s names bandied about, but this was the first time I’d heard Guerrero’s.

*Jerome Boateng and Eric Choupo-Moting both suffered knee injuries while on international duty for Germany. Boateng’s is less serious. He will be sidelined with rest and rehab for 4 weeks. Choupo-Moting’s torn cartilage injury required surgery; he’s out for at least 3 months and will miss most of the pre-season training this summer.

*Ivica Olic may not transfer to Portsmouth, but Newcastle. Olic finished the season as HSV’s leading scorer.

*Mohammed Zidan may be moving on after a less-than-stellar first season at HSV. Now that Jurgen Klopp is manager at Dortmund, speculation is that he will bring in Zidan. Klopp was like a father to Zidan while at Mainz. HSV paid a €7M transfer fee for Zidan last summer.

*First Arsenal, now Fiorentina.

*HSV are negotiating the transfer of Freiburg midfielder Dennis Aogo. Aogo is currently on duty with Germany’s U21 in Denmark, and will travel to Hamburg for a physical following the match. Aogo made his B’liga debut with Freiburg at the ripe old age of 17.

*A large contingent of HSV players are competing in the upcoming Euro 2008, and surprisingly, Piotr Trochowski is one of them. Since he had not garnered a lot of PT lately at HSV, it was speculated that he would be among the final cuts for Germany. Offside Bundesliga boss Jan is following Germany at the Euro blog.