GC in the basement match against SLO: Hoppers boss supports Bruno Berner

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A major Swiss club is embroiled in a relegation battle. No, we are not talking about FCB here. Because besides Basel, things in the rankings are anything but rosy. The big difference with red-blue: there is no panic among the residents of Zurich.

Not this Friday either. Two days before the basement match against Stade-Lausanne-Ouchy, the promoted team is second from bottom and the standings are third from bottom, coach Bruno Berner, sports director Bernt Haas and president Matt Jackson appear at the press conference for no apparent reason.

Support for coach Bruno Berner

The Englishman does not want to hear anything about calling for a relegation battle in the style of his colleague David Degen. Jackson: “The great thing about a championship is that at the end of the season you are exactly where you deserve to be. But the season is still young. It may be a cliché, but we take it game by game.”

Fear of relegation? So far only in Basel, not at GC. While the third coach is already working at Basel this season, Bruno Berner (45) seems to be firmly in the saddle in the rankings. “There is absolute support for the entire team,” Jackson assures, “we want to develop together in the long term.”

But Berner’s balance sheet is thin, even despite the reduced ambitions of the record champions. Averaging just 0.85 points per game in the thirteen Super League rounds to date, Berner is the ranking coach with the third-worst performance record in the club’s history. Only the two coaches from the relegation season, Thorsten Fink (0.79 points) and Tomislav Stipic (0.6 points), are in even worse shape.

Berner gets fewer points than Winterthur

And another bitter statistical pill for Berner: Even last season, as coach of the newly promoted Winterthur, he was more successful in terms of points average than now in Zurich (0.89 points). Was his move up the rankings even a step backwards? Berner: “I would not have come to the rankings if I was not convinced that I could make progress here as a coach.”

Jackson also tries to convey his conviction when the conversation turns to the WG sale rumors. “Since I’ve been here, the club has been sold fifteen times, if all the rumors were true,” says the club boss jokingly.

Recently there has been interest from Germany and the US, where the owners of Los Angeles FC are apparently considering the “Chicago-Lugano model”. GC as a branch of Amis? “I only hear this through third parties,” says Jackson. The Englishman emphasizes that the Chinese are still under no pressure to sell and are making long-term plans. But is he even involved if there is a GC sell-off in China? Jackson: “I don’t want to be involved in any potential investment discussions at all. My job here in Zurich is to help the club move forward every day.”

But the standings have now reached a point where even a win against SLO would mean some kind of liberation.

Source : Blick