Posts, Possession, and Pain

There are games where, after the final whistle, all you can do is stare into the night sky and wonder if someone up there is holding a giant magnet over the crossbar. A 0–2 loss in Augsburg, despite 70% possession, three shots off the woodwork, and enough dominance to make a chess grandmaster blush – but as we all know, football doesn’t reward style points. It rewards goals. And that’s where our beloved Werkself came up painfully short.

We knew it wouldn’t be a walk in the park. Augsburg, that gritty mix of cinder block defense and lightning-fast counters, has a history of ruining weekends. But when you control the game like we did, when you dictate every tempo change and pass the ball around with surgical precision – you’d hope for more than a goose egg on the scoreboard. Sadly, precision without punch is like bringing a scalpel to a street fight.

Let’s be clear – the performance wasn’t bad. If you're a fan of data and heatmaps, this was your jam. Pass accuracy in the 90s, a dominant duel ratio, and a shot count that would usually result in two or three goals. But instead of finding the net, we found the frame. Repeatedly. Schick, Ben Seghir, Tella – all with chances that deserved better. If hitting the post earned points, we’d be top of the league by now.

Coach Hjulmand, ever the calm Scandinavian, talked about “getting back to the character of our game.” Which sounds like something from a TED Talk, but maybe there’s truth in it. Because if we’re honest, things looked a bit off already in the last games. That slick cup win in Dortmund might’ve masked some cracks. Against a side like Augsburg, those cracks became visible – especially in defense, where one long ball equals one goal conceded.

Now we face Newcastle, Köln, and Leipzig to close out the year – and suddenly the margin for error is gone. We need to turn our woodwork waltz into a goal fest, or risk undoing much of the great work from earlier in the season. Augsburg was a stumble, not a collapse. But let’s not pretend it was just bad luck. Sometimes the football gods test your focus. Let’s hope our answer in the coming weeks is loud, precise – and finally on target.