After the miserable start to the Super League, the Bernese have to expand their vocabulary to include the term basement duel. YB coach Patrick Rahmen has no gifts to hand out when he returns to Winterthur.
Returning to Winterthur and desperately needing a win: Patrick Rahmen, the coach of Young Boys.
Peter Klaunzer / Keystone
In fact, the term was banned from the vocabulary in Bern many years ago. But late on Tuesday evening, after the 3-0 defeat to Aston Villa in the Champions League, a reporter reintroduced it. That might sound strange, he said, but now there is a “bottom-of-the-table clash” coming up in the Super League this weekend against Winterthur.
During the week, Champions League, stars everywhere in the Wankdorf, plus a Alex Reed from the Premier League, the richest league in the world. And at the weekend, as strange as it may sound: basement duel, on the Schützenwiese, against FC Winterthur. In the YB universe, there are two planets in the 2024/25 season, and so far it seems as if they are being visited by two completely different expeditions.
In the championship, the champions are still waiting for a win after six games, the only team in the league. The Bernese have only won three points and are in last place. They have never started a Super League season so badly.
Directly ahead of Young Boys is Winterthur, the outsider who has also only won four points, like ninth-placed Grasshoppers. And now Winterthur and GC are YB’s next opponents in the championship.
The Young Boys are therefore facing not just one, but two basement duels. These will be crucial games for them, games that they have to win, they have no other choice. The season is still young, but they are already ten points behind leaders Lugano.
The Berne mortgage should not get any bigger
Paying off such a mortgage will be a complicated task either way. It should therefore not be any bigger. Especially since the Champions League brings fame, honor and money, but the new format also means eight additional games instead of the previous six, which will put a lot of strain on YB until January.
When the discussion turned to next weekend on Tuesday evening, the bottom-of-the-table clash against Winterthur, YB coach Patrick Rahmen only said a few words about it. But they gave us a deep insight.
Rahmen promised “full focus” on the Winterthur game. He said that everyone should feel “that we absolutely want to win the game.” At first, that sounded like empty phrases that football coaches like to use. But they illustrated what the Bernese sometimes lacked on Swiss football pitches this season. It was the elementary things, namely: focus. The will to win.
Foreign countries, on the other hand, have been a source of strength for the Young Boys this season. When they beat Galatasaray Istanbul in the Champions League play-offs, they did so in impressive fashion. When the Bernese expedition returned to the Swiss pitches, it had little in common with their international performances: 1:1 against Lausanne, then, in the cup, a hard-fought 4:2 in Vevey, including a surrendered two-goal lead.
On Tuesday against Aston Villa, YB started the match strongly. They were full of determination, full of courage and full of focus. But it only took one mistake for their whole self-confidence to collapse. After a corner, the Bernese did not even give Youri Tielemans an escort – 0:1.
Fragility and lack of leaders
A few minutes later, a YB defender came up with the idea of playing a back pass in his own penalty area and under great pressure – 0:2. The slip-up was made by Mohamed Ali Camara, the head of defense. The scene illustrated one of Bern’s problems: there is a lack of leading players. And those who have this status also make such mistakes.
After the match against Aston Villa, the Bernese praised themselves for their strong start, but in the end a different impression remained: that the Young Boys have also become more fragile in international business. A game that they have the right to lose, they lost in a way that they really shouldn’t lose.
And now Winterthur. The game is particularly important for Patrick Rahmen. Last season he was the boss at Schützenwiese and recommended himself for the most coveted coaching position in the country, the one in Bern.
In Winterthur, Rahmen was bid farewell with applause. Now he is returning as coach of YB, whose team has already been booed this season. He will meet his successor, Ognjen Zaric, who had previously been his assistant in Winterthur. On Friday, Rahmen said that this return was a “special moment” for him, also because Winterthur had allowed him to move to Bern.
But there is no room for sentimental feelings on Sunday. Rahmen needs the win, and for that he needs YB from the planet Champions League qualification. He does think that there is only one YB. And that this one YB was not as bad in Switzerland as the score suggests. He says that you have to look at the individual games, look at the “big picture”. But he also knows that in the end only one thing counts: the table.
