Hertha Berlin’s humbling at Schalke feels less a setback, more a fatal blow

“T hat,” said Benjamin Weber, “was a real slap in the face.” Hertha’s sporting director has been in situ for less than three months, but he is already acclimatised to the chaos of the capital club. Not surprisingly, perhaps. Before returning to the club in late January he had served the club for almost two decades in a variety of roles. “I’m a Berliner. I’m a Herthaner,” he told his introductory press conference.

This, then, will hurt. Hertha have been circling the drain for a while now, retaining their top-flight place via the relegation playoff last season having finished two points clear of the playoff spot the campaign before. This season has been more of the same struggle and instability. However this, as Weber’s assessment suggested, was something so much worse than the troubles to which they have become accustomed in recent times.

Friday’s trip to Schalke represented an opportunity to breathe some life back into a flagging season and to begin to cut away one of the weakest (if not the weakest) team in the division. Instead, Hertha ended up looking like a team “unfit for the Bundesliga,” as WAZ’s Philipp Ziser put it, conceding five goals to the lowest scorers in the division and slumping to rock bottom.

It had felt as if coach Sandro Schwarz was safe before this, despite the team’s difficulties, with it broadly understood that the travails on the pitch are largely a product of the circus of recent seasons off it. They have seen unsuccessful investment, power struggles, relatively modest Union becoming indisputably Berlin’s best team, the bizarre Jürgen Klinsmann era and more. Yet the nature of this humbling felt like not just a setback but a fatal blow that was unjustifiable, unacceptable and inexcusable.

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