When one of your most experienced players drops you in it, there really is no comeback. As Freiburg’s players stood in the corridors of Stade Europa-Park picking the bones out of a draining week, ending in the just-finished, narrow defeat by the runaway leaders, Bayer Leverkusen, and which had incorporated a chastening, emphatic Europa League exit at West Ham, perhaps guards were down, careless words falling out of leaden lips.
The defender Christian Günter, approaching the mark of 400 first-team games for the club, spoke of his hope that the Bundesliga’s longest-serving coach, Christian Streich, would stay on, despite the sense of a season denouement with no contract extension signed by the man in charge. “It was, or is, a pleasure to train under him,” Günter stumbled and then corrected himself. He has been there almost every step of the way of Streich’s glorious 12-year spell in charge and even imagining a different voice giving the instructions will take some getting used to, once he leaves at the season’s end.
