Best points average in the league –
And GC trainer Oral even still has his trick with the car wash
In his first five games with GC, Tomas Oral never lost. The German has stabilized the team, but the Grasshoppers are now facing difficult weeks.
Published today at 5:05 p.m
In November, Tomas Oral was hired as Marco Schällibaum’s successor in Zurich. The German has never lost in the league since then.
Photo: Daniela Frutiger (Freshfocus)
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- GC coach Tomas Oral is unbeaten after five league games and currently has the best points average of all coaches in the league.
- The German is known for his unusual measures; in Frankfurt he once sent his players through a car wash.
- Oral’s contract runs until the end of the season. What happens next is still unclear.
No matter what happens next, no one can take away Tomas Oral’s place in German football history.
It’s been ten years since FSV Frankfurt hired him as a coach before the last matchday of the 2014/15 season to save the club from relegation to the third division. There wasn’t much time, so Oral had his players run through a car wash to drive away the ghosts of the past.
Sounds like a trick from a rather yellowed motivational guide, but it helped: Frankfurt won in Düsseldorf, avoided relegation – and Oral is still asked about the campaign from time to time. Again now.
The 51-year-old sits in a barren room on the Grasshopper Club campus in Niederhasli. On Saturday his team will meet the Young Boys, which will be GC’s first home game of the year. After that the opponents are: Servette, Lausanne, Lugano, again Lausanne, again YB. Sounds uncomfortable, and Oral’s memories of Frankfurt should actually be very far away now. But they aren’t.
Only defeat in the cup against FCZ
Something has happened since Oral has been in Zurich, he has made a difference, there is no other way to explain the upswing. Before he was introduced as Marco Schällibaum’s successor in November: five defeats from the last six games. After that: three draws and two wins. Oral has only lost in the cup so far, against the FCZ. He currently has the best points average of all coaches in the league.
How did he manage to do that? How did he do that? “When no one noticed, we all walked through the car wash together,” says Oral and has to laugh. It’s a joke.
Oral has found other tricks at GC to initiate what he calls the “self-cleaning process” of the players. “We did a few things,” he says, but he doesn’t want to reveal anything more. “It’s a good sign that we do certain things in the dressing room and no one notices. That shows me: We have a good sense of togetherness.”
«We react well to setbacks. That speaks for our team spirit.”
-Tomas Oral, GC-Trainer
In terms of play, he hasn’t changed anything fundamental. Anyway, he came in the middle of the season and had to Most recently, in Sitten, they were outnumbered for almost an entire game. «We taught the boys to be compact in all phases of the game. We have to tackle resistance and roll up our sleeves.” Now it sounds a bit like motivational advice again, but it seems to work.
Under Oral and his assistant coach Michael Henke, GC scored one goal in every league game and never conceded more than one goal. “We react well to setbacks, as we recently showed in Sion. That’s important, it speaks for our team spirit,” says Oral.
It remains to be seen whether he can still maintain that in four or five weeks. GC is currently safely in 10th place in the table, but things can move quickly in this league. Especially since we don’t yet know which players could leave Zurich this winter.
Tomas Oral at his presentation in November alongside GC sports director Stephan Schwarz (left).
Foto: Urs Lindt (Freshfocus)
The 51-year-old’s signing did not cause any storms of enthusiasm last November. Oral had previously been without a job for a year and a half, and in Sandhausen he had to leave after just two months. He is a former companion of Harald Gärtner, the European manager of the GC owners in Los Angeles. The word “emergency solution” quickly came up.
Peter Zeidler and Patrick Frame are said to have canceled, and Gerald Scheiblehner did not receive approval in Austria. At the end came Oral, a coach with experience in lower German leagues and an assistant coach position under Felix Magath at Fulham FC. However, as head coach, Zurich is his first stop abroad.
Not much is known about the 51-year-old; he declined interview requests this week. And so what remains is what you can read about him or what former companions say. There is talk of a “hard style”, a “provocateur”, a “bad loser”, but also a “good motivator”, a “positive crazy person”, someone who knows how to train “well and in a varied way”. .
Perhaps the most important sentence was written by the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” about Oral four years ago, in the season when he led FC Ingolstadt to the second division. “It is quite possible that Oral has been fired more often for atmospheric reasons than for sporting reasons.” Fittingly, the club parted ways with him shortly afterwards – even though he managed promotion.
His contract with GC runs until the end of the season
When it comes to atmospherics, Oral has once again taken on a difficult task with GC. The club is searching for itself; from the outside it is difficult to see where and at what pace GC is developing. And it’s certainly not easy for the coach when certain clauses either automatically bind the players to the club or force them to leave.
Oral’s contract runs until the end of this season, so he doesn’t want to think about it anymore. “I have put myself on a level privately where I can do something other than being a coach at any time. “We can extend the contract on the evening of June 30th,” he says, he knows the mechanics of the business.
The latest results speak for him. But Tomas Oral knows that this can change quickly. And that long-term success with GC requires more than just going through a car wash and rolling up a few sleeves.
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