There is a story told about Felix Magath in which he sent his players on a training run through a forest, then hid their water bottles upon their return.
It is supposed to reveal him as dictatorial and tyrannical, which is not an entirely unfair assessment, since it leaves out crucial details. Magath was angered by an incident in Wolfsburg’s 3-0 defeat at Bayern Munich in which no player had checked on the well-being of the goalkeeper Diego Benaglia after he had collided with Arjen Robben.
Magath felt they had abandoned a teammate and wanted to challenge them to help each other. So he emptied all but 10 water bottles to encourage them to share. Unorthodox, perhaps. Unwise, maybe. But it was not an act wholly without logic.
Still, Magath comes with a fearsome reputation. As a profile in Spiegel magazine noted last week, Magath these days is “more feared than loved” in Germany, something that had contributed to his inability to land a job since leaving Wolfsburg in October 2012.
Too many are too scarred by the stories of the special hill Magath had constructed on the training pitch at Wolfsburg so he could have players run up and down it, or by the anecdote of the Brazilian striker Grafite, now playing for Dubai’s Al Ahli, collapsing on an Alpine walk, or by the reports that he rarely believes players are really injured and has in the past made supposed malingerers jog around a pitch for two hours.
Yet Magath is successful. He saved Nuremberg, Werder Bremen and Eintracht Frankfurt from relegation in the late 1990s, having been parachuted into crises. He led Bayern Munich to two German doubles and he even won the league at unfashionable Wolfsburg. It is just that his methods, the relentless drilling, the demand for absolute focus and fitness, seem a little old-fashioned.
Certainly, Dimitar Berbatov, Bryan Ruiz and Adel Taarabt, none exactly noted for their diligence, will probably feel they did well to get out of the club when they did, leaving in January. But, realistically, Magath’s notorious regimen is unlikely to come into effect until the close season, anyway. Hammering players now is only going to exhaust them.
Yet the issue with Fulham is less Magath himself than the fact there is another new man there at all. Rene Meulensteen was in charge for 75 days, in which time Fulham played 13 league games, the same number they had played this season under predecessor Martin Jol. Both managers won 10 points this season, and the goal difference was better under Jol.
That reflects poorly on Meulensteen, there is a sense that he was ousted just as the club was moving his way. He off-loaded eight players in January and brought in seven, and while the past two games, against Manchester United and Liverpool, yielded only a point, the performances were good enough to suggest things were trending in the right direction.
That is backed up by the underlying stats that show shots conceded per game dropping from 19.8 under Jol to 17.5 under Meulensteen, while shots on goal increased from 8.1 to 13.8.
Given that Alan Curbishley and Ray Wilkins, hired to strengthen the back-room staff, were also dismissed this week, you wonder who has been dispensing advice to the owner, Shahid Khan.
If, as Chris Anderson and David Sally argue in The Numbers Game, games between sides of roughly equal ability are 50 per cent decided by luck, 13 games isn’t enough to judge anybody or anything, particularly not if he is reshaping the squad as he goes.
None of which changes Magath’s job, which is to drag Fulham to safety in the final 12 games of the season. They are four points from safety and realistically require a minimum of 15 points and perhaps as many as 18 to be safe.
Magath’s claim that Saturday’s game against West Brom is the biggest in the club’s history is an exaggeration – the 1975 FA Cup final and the 2010 Europa League final were bigger, for starters – but with four of Fulham’s remaining games against sides in the top six, and West Brom fourth from the bottom, it is clearly hugely significant, both in terms of setting the tone for the rest of the season and actual points.
sports@thenational.ae
Follow us on twitter at @SprtNationalUAE
