MUNICH: Under-fire Bayern Munich coach Niko Kovac is staring down the barrel as his team look to bag a place in the Champions League last 16 just as their domestic title bid appears to be crumbling.
The Bundesliga champions need just a point against Benfica in the Allianz Arena on Tuesday to qualify for the competition’s knockout stages, but as they gun for their seventh straight league title their form has collapsed.
Pressure on Kovac intensified following the weekend’s shock 3-3 home draw with lowly Fortuna Dusseldorf, which left them nine points behind leaders Borussia Dortmund, but the Croat says he will not back down from the battle in his first season in charge.
“Those who know me know I’m a fighter ... the words ‘give up’ and ‘raise the white flag’ aren’t in my vocabulary,” Kovac said.
“I will always look forward and always fight.”
Kovac’s position became more precarious when livid Bayern chief Uli Hoeness said after the draw with Fortuna that the club would undertake “an analysis” after the Benfica clash.
Hoeness blasted his players’ performances as “unacceptable” after they threw away a two-goal lead and conceded a stoppage-time equalizer from hat-trick hero Dodi Lukebakio.
“The problem isn’t that we have no ideas, it’s more about how we put our ideas into practice,” said Kovac.
“Manuel Neuer said after the match (against Fortuna): ‘if we had put into practice what the coach asked us, we would have won’.”
The draw means that Bayern have only one twice in eight Bundesliga matches, a run that stretches back to late September. In contrast, they are unbeaten in their Champions League Group E campaign.
A win on Tuesday could see Bayern ensure top spot in the group, although Ajax are traveling to AEK Athens, who have conceded 10 goals on their way to losing all four of their matches.
Kovac’s work has been made harder by a raft of injuries, with Corentin Tolisso, Kingsley Coman, Thiago, James Rodriguez and Serge Gnabry all out of action, but nonetheless his team is close to qualifying for the last 16 of Europe’s top club competition with a game to spare.
“We cannot throw everything overboard, it does not work that way,” Kovac said.
“I hope that tomorrow, in the Champions League, the boys will give their all, and I am convinced of it.”
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Bayern Munich coach Niko Kovac in need of a Champions League lift
Bayern Munich coach Niko Kovac in need of a Champions League lift
Football returns to Gaza pitch scarred by war and loss
- Fans gather to cheer the first football tournament in two years in the ruins of Gaza City’s Tal Al-Hawa district
- 'No matter what happened in terms of destruction and genocidal war, we continue with playing,' Gazan footballer says
On a worn-out five-a-side pitch in a wasteland of ruined buildings and rubble, Jabalia Youth took on Al-Sadaqa in the Gaza Strip’s first organized football tournament in more than two years.
The match ended in a draw, as did a second fixture featuring Beit Hanoun vs Al-Shujaiya. But the spectators were hardly disappointed, cheering and shaking the chain-link fence next to the Palestine Pitch in the ruins of Gaza City’s Tal Al-Hawa district.
Boys climbed a broken concrete wall or peered through holes in the ruins to get a look. Someone was banging on a drum.
Youssef Jendiya, 21, one of the Jabalia Youth players from a part of Gaza largely depopulated and bulldozed by Israeli forces, described his feeling at being back on the pitch: “Confused. Happy, sad, joyful, happy.”
“People search for water in the morning: food, bread. Life is a little difficult. But there is a little left of the day, when you can come and play football and express some of the joy inside you,” he said.
“You come to the stadium missing many of your teammates... killed, injured, or those who traveled for treatment. So the joy is incomplete.”
Four months since a ceasefire ended major fighting in Gaza, there has been almost no reconstruction. Israeli forces have ordered all residents out of nearly two-thirds of the strip, jamming more than 2 million people into a sliver of ruins along the coast, most in makeshift tents or damaged buildings.
The former site of Gaza City’s 9,000-seat Yarmouk Stadium, which Israeli forces levelled during the war and used as a detention center, now houses displaced families in white tents, crowded in the brown dirt of what was once the pitch.
For this week’s tournament the Football Association managed to clear the rubble from a collapsed wall off a half-sized pitch, put up a fence and sweep the debris off the old artificial turf.
By coming out, the teams were “delivering a message,” said Amjad Abu Awda, 31, a player for Beit Hanoun. “That no matter what happened in terms of destruction and genocidal war, we continue with playing, and with life. Life must continue.”
The match ended in a draw, as did a second fixture featuring Beit Hanoun vs Al-Shujaiya. But the spectators were hardly disappointed, cheering and shaking the chain-link fence next to the Palestine Pitch in the ruins of Gaza City’s Tal Al-Hawa district.
Boys climbed a broken concrete wall or peered through holes in the ruins to get a look. Someone was banging on a drum.
Youssef Jendiya, 21, one of the Jabalia Youth players from a part of Gaza largely depopulated and bulldozed by Israeli forces, described his feeling at being back on the pitch: “Confused. Happy, sad, joyful, happy.”
“People search for water in the morning: food, bread. Life is a little difficult. But there is a little left of the day, when you can come and play football and express some of the joy inside you,” he said.
“You come to the stadium missing many of your teammates... killed, injured, or those who traveled for treatment. So the joy is incomplete.”
Four months since a ceasefire ended major fighting in Gaza, there has been almost no reconstruction. Israeli forces have ordered all residents out of nearly two-thirds of the strip, jamming more than 2 million people into a sliver of ruins along the coast, most in makeshift tents or damaged buildings.
The former site of Gaza City’s 9,000-seat Yarmouk Stadium, which Israeli forces levelled during the war and used as a detention center, now houses displaced families in white tents, crowded in the brown dirt of what was once the pitch.
For this week’s tournament the Football Association managed to clear the rubble from a collapsed wall off a half-sized pitch, put up a fence and sweep the debris off the old artificial turf.
By coming out, the teams were “delivering a message,” said Amjad Abu Awda, 31, a player for Beit Hanoun. “That no matter what happened in terms of destruction and genocidal war, we continue with playing, and with life. Life must continue.”
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