three<\/strong> players from Mumbai over the course of the season. Shanks and Dane joined in September and were immediately loaned back to India – they will be part of next season’s squad I hope.<\/p>\nAs I said, Hanno’s backchat saw him bombed out to Eintracht. Kokkinis was a bad signing by me, he was nowhere near the standard required so has gone to Fortuna to prove me wrong.<\/p>\n
Swiderski, as I said, wanted out. He came to me demanding a move to Stuttgart and my policy has always been to move an unhappy player on as quickly as possible – I felt \u20ac6.5m upfront was a decent sum considering I had a good replacement already at the club in Bangoura.<\/p>\n
Finally, I didn’t feel the Oman international Lucas was quite ready for us yet so he went out to Nurnberg to develop a bit more.<\/p>\n
All that would suggest we didn’t need much in the way of signings, right? Wrong. I went a bit crazy shopper.<\/p>\n
19 new faces. Why so many? I new we needed to rebuild the defence further as I wasn’t happy with my central defence options or my left back on loan from Bayern. The New Zealand keeper I had wasn’t convincing me either, so I was in the market for a new shot-stopper. I was also keen on finding at least one more striker as other than a couple of games we had been very wasteful in good positions.<\/p>\n
Some of these boys were bought with the now in mind, but at least eleven of them were thinking about the future and went straight into the U19 squad.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
After the Christmas break we were obviously transitioning in a few new faces but it did not make any difference to the results at all. In fact, we stepped up a gear culminating in a last-gasp win over leaders Stuttgart – a result that made all of us believe we could go up automatically.<\/p>\n
Bangoura was better than Swiderski from the off, but Hugo Cardenas proved to be trouble from the word go. Even though he’d only cost me \u20ac500k, he was on \u20ac35k a week. Why? The scouts rated him very, very highly and a couple of Premier League clubs had been after him at the same time. A week after joining he came in to the office saying I hadn’t kept a promise of strengthening the squad. Mate, I bought 18 other players – what else did you want? He was straight on the list and Sampdoria signed him for next season. But, he was still a decent player so I kept in the squad until he tore a calf and was ruled out for the rest of the season.<\/p>\n
Of the new boys, Diomande was standing out. He’s an Ivory Coast international striker with an eye for goal and could easily go on and boss a top flight in the future. Not bad for \u20ac350k. Ahmed Magdy, an Egyptian centre-back, was forming a good partnership at the back with Papa and our new left back was doing alright too – a few of you might remember Dawson Fernandes?<\/p>\n
With seven games going we were 2nd in the table in an automatic promotion place. We had a four-point gap from Hannover in 3rd, but Stuttgart were still 8 points ahead.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The run in kicked off with a tough 1-1 draw with Kaiserslauten where Tim Amlang saved us with a wonderful strike. Next were Hannover, the only team that could really catch us in second. We were stunningly good, dominating the ball and stopping them from having a shot on target. From there it was clean sheets all the way to Furth, where the point meant we had a six-point lead with two games left but, crucially, a far superior goal difference.<\/p>\n
We couldn’t screw it up from here. Could we? Could we?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Back-to-back hat-tricks from Diomande at the club had a new hero.<\/p>\n
We were up!<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Yeah, yeah the board aren’t ecstatic but we are up and that is the most important thing.<\/p>\n
We ended the season selecting what I considered to be our first choice side.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The lads highlighted made the biggest impact for me but, in fairness to the rest of them, it was a stunning effort as it was a team thrown together with a mix of scattergun recruitment, some risk-free gambles and hunches.<\/p>\n
If you look at the key facts – \u20ac102m raised in player sales, \u20ac26m reinvested. The wage bill halved from \u20ac1.1m being spent a week to \u20ac550k. The average age of the squad dropping from 31 to 23. 22 matches unbeaten. 16 clean sheets – it was a fantastic season.<\/p>\n
The whole point of me going to Germany was to prove I could manage in a “proper” country so, hopefully, this is a good step towards getting that monkey off my back – just got to do it in the Bundesliga now.<\/p>\n
Right, that’s 1200 words – so “how we are recruiting” can be another post later today. Enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Catch up on the ISL leg of the journey here For the Hamburg part of the story so far, go here It’s been a while since I’ve written an almost whole season roundup, so here we go. I’ll break it into the following parts. How we did (as in, do I still have a job?) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19622,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[103,248],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n
Hopped it to Hamburg Part XXX: Can I do it on a cold night in Frankfurt? - The Higher Tempo Press<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n