It will be a special trip for a handful of Green-Whites who’ll make their way to Hamburg this week, but on Thursday, Alexander Nouri’s men won’t be there to face HSV in the “Nordderby”. Instead, Werder will be facing second division side FC St. Pauli in a friendly at the Millerntor (18:30 CEST).
Below, WERDER.DE puts this week’s opposition under the microscope, assessing the club’s current situation and the most recent clashes between the two teams, as well as highlighting a few reunions for some current Green-Whites.
While Fin Bartels was under contract with St. Pauli between 2010 and 2014, Max Kruse was at HSV Hamburg between 2009 and 2012. When he left the club for Freiburg, he also arrived with Lennart Thy, a former Werder player, who spent four years in total by the Elbe. As is well-known, Kruse and Thy have been playing back in their home town since the summer. However it was Werder’s current assistant coach Florian Bruns who was part of the most eventful period at the Millerntor when he moved from Alemannia Aachen to St. Pauli in 2006. At the time, St. Pauli were still playing in the Regionalliga Nord. However head coach Holger Stanislawski took them all the way to the Bundesliga in just four seasons. Bruns wore the Pauli shirt for a total of seven before he took up the role of Werder U23s captain in 2013.
Both teams came up against each other in the 2011/11 Bundesliga season. SVW won the away fixture 3-1 on matchday 31, although they were then relegated at the end of the season back to the 2. Bundesliga. They went on to narrowly miss out on promotion in the 2011/12 and 2015/16 seasons with two fourth-placed finishes.
It is currently not going as well under head coach Ewald Lienen. With five points from eight matches, the hosts sit in the 2. Bundesliga relegation zone with just one home win to their name so far this season against Arminia Bielefeld on matchday 4. One of the goals in this victory came from Aziz Bouhaddouz. The striker, who made the switch to St. Pauli from SV Sandhausen in the summer, is the team’s top scorer in this season’s campaign with three goals. But Lienen will have to do without his main goalscorer against Werder since Bouhaddouz is on international duty with Morocco.
The DFB Cup quarter-final clash in 2005/6 remains very much in the memory of the two clubs, which Werder lost 1-3 in extremely icy conditions. Miroslav Klose picked up an injury in the first half, with Werder ‘sliding’ out of the DFB Cup. “The game should never have been allowed to take place. There was no way you could play football on that pitch,” explained Klaus Allofs at the time. In 2009/10 Werder managed to get their long-awaited revenge, winning 2-1 in the second round of the cup and then progressing all the way to the final in the same season.
It’s now been three years since SVW played the cult club on their home turf. In September 2013, Werder succumbed to a 4-1 defeat in the port town, with Martin Kobylanksi scoring a consolation effort for Bremen. A similar result in the game this Thursday will not please Alex Nouri, who will be taking charge of the team for the first time as the permanent head coach of Werder. He will want to give all those players who are not with their national teams and not injured, valuable playing time in the friendly.
