Time to honour Middendorp

With the 2007/08 Bundesliga season as good as over (if you haven't followed the German media, let me tell you that Bayern have already won the league), it's about time we honour the coach of the year. No, it's not Ottmar Hitzfeld, despite leading the Munich giants back to the top of the heap and presumably also to triumph in Europe. (The German media is as yet undecided whether Bayern will certainly win the UEFA Cup - or just probably.)

The coach of the year, according to a representative Soccernet poll held among all German-born columnists, is Ernst Middendorp, the man in charge of Arminia Bielefeld.

A look at the current standings will tell you that Arminia are one of the few teams still able to catch a glimpse of Bayern, albeit only on a clear day. That, however, is just a part of the reason why it's time to honour Middendorp.

It's unlikely Bielefeld will stay in the upper third of the table for too long (then again, with Middendorp you can never tell), though even a mid-table position would be mighty fine for one of the traditionally most unglamorous teams in the Bundesliga.

A bigger part of the reason why Middendorp is our coach of the year is that he was certainly the hero of last season's script, never mind Stuttgart's Armin Veh.

Bielefeld did very well and held fifth place as late as November, then the debates about the future of coach Thomas von Heesen proved to have negative effects. Von Heesen, if you recall, complained the club was slow in offering him a contract extension and was linked with other jobs, in particular Borussia Dortmund.

Suddenly the kind of downward spiral was set in motion that usually results in relegation. Arminia stopped winning, then started losing (even at home against 'Gladbach, woefully incompetent whenever playing away). Von Heesen stepped down, his assistant took over and lost three out for four. By mid-March, Arminia were in 17th place and in dire need of a saviour figure.

The man who filled that role would have been an odd choice at any other club. The 48-year-old Ernst Middendorp had spent the last two years at Kaizer Chiefs in South Africa, where he'd been sacked less than two weeks before Bielefeld came looking for help. Prior to the job in Johannesburg, Middendorp had coached in Tabriz and Accra. (In Iran and Ghana, respectively, in case you don't have an atlas to hand.)

Under Middendorp, Bielefeld won four of the last five games of the season and reached the finishing line well ahead of the relegation zone.

But the turnaround had almost been nipped in the bud, by Middendorp himself. Just five weeks after he'd taken over, the police checked a Mercedes parked on a federal road at 3 O'clock in the morning and found the Bielefeld coach inside, with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.18.

Middendorp later joked about the 25,000 Euro fine: 'It was for ill- mannered traffic behaviour in high spirits.' In truth, the police had found him unconscious, slumped over the steering wheel. Middendorp himself informed the club about this incident and offered his resignation. The board declined his tender and a few days later Bielefeld beat title hopefuls Werder Bremen.

However, this episode may give you an idea why Middendorp was never really considered for a proper coach of the year award. And never will be, unless he wins a trophy; which is unlikely, despite his habit of weaving magic in eastern Westphalia.

But that's not to say he hasn't been honoured. He is Arminia Bielefeld's official 'Coach of the Century', a title he received well before his March engagement. And this is why Bielefeld trusted him with saving the side from relegation when most other clubs wouldn't even have considered him: Middendorp's current stint with Arminia is already his third, and he has a stunning track record of success at this particular club, even if hardly anywhere else.

Middendorp first took over the club in its darkest hour. When he was put in charge of a team that was staring relegation from the second division in the face, in April of 1988, he was a complete unknown who'd never coached anywhere near the professional game and worked as a teacher at a private school.

His appointment was not a stroke of genius, however, but an act of desperation. Middendorp was Bielefeld's sixth coach that season (!), there was no way to save the team from the drop and, to top it all, Arminia were as good as bankrupt.

Still, that didn't stop Middendorp from being unpleasantly cocky. After his team had lost a game in Berlin, he opened the press conference by teaching the writers how to spell his name. He'd never really lose that air of gruff arrogance during his first stint in Bielefeld.

Or his second. According to Wikipedia, the official club statement that announced he was elected Arminia's coach of the century said: 'In the late 1980s, he built a new team from scratch and, during his second stint, led Arminia from the third division to the Bundesliga.' Then it added: 'A brilliant motivator, though he does not carry a diplomatic passport.'

That's a nice way of putting it. In the 1990s, Bielefeld's business manager Rüdiger Lamm famously said: 'I'm nuts. But this guy is stark raving mad.' Perhaps because Middendorp once told a journalist:

'Kneel down, you dolt!' Or because he replied to a TV reporter's request for an interview with a barrage of expletives which I can't quote here, as minors might be present.

Or because his match analyses often centre around the kind of war imagery that has long since been outlawed in Germany, in which players are soldiers you have to sent into the trenches or in which teams draw first blood.

Or because you'd never know what passing fancy might catch him when at the sideline: back when Arminia were in the third division, Middendorp once told his sweeper and one of the strikers to swap positions, which resulted in Bielefeld's first loss of the season.

'The damage is done,' Middendorp today laconically says about the years when he did his very best to cement his reputation as a potentially dangerous madman. It doesn't help that he says this in English. Or that he admits: 'Sometimes I'm border-line insane.'

But no matter which theory you adhere to - that he once was a weirdo but has now mellowed or that he's still as crazy as he's always been or that he'd never been mad in the first place, only over-determined; there is no denying he's had great success in Bielefeld.

Still has. And, as the Berlin paper 'Tagesspiegel' predicts, will have: 'If Arminia should sack him once more, he won't care. In that case he'll trek around the world again for another few years - until they ask him to come back.'

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Uli's seminal history of German football, Tor!, is available online.

Also available: Uli's Flutlicht und Schatten for all you German scholars to gen up on the history of the European Cup.

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