COTTINGHAM — Tim Walter’s voice booms out over the plush green training pitches at Hull City’s Cottingham training ground.
We are deep into week four of pre-season and the Championship’s opening weekend is hurtling into view. Time is of the essence.
“No, no, no! Not like this, it’s too narrow!” Walter shouts, calling a halt to the fast-paced 9 v 9 game.
Quick, to the point instructions follow before the action resumes. It’s a blur of black and green, all high tempo sprinting and short, sharp passes with players facing goal.
In the middle Xavier Simons, Hull’s 21-year-old holding midfielder being readied for a big role this season, stands out as the only man wearing a white bib.
He’s “the joker” today, playing for both sides with a remit to find the right positions to open up spaces for teammates on both sides while also being burdened with defensive responsibilities.
Forget passing drills or shooting sessions, it has been as intense as this all summer at Hull.
Some days the pitch has been redrawn for them to work on width or diagonals, others days they have played with no bounces allowed.
Every session carries a challenge or scenario to hammer home Walter’s key principles and a common theme is “pressure” – training players to be “awake” and available to win the ball and then move at pace at all times.
It is, insiders tell i, unlike any pre-season they’ve ever seen before.
And at the centre of it is German boss Walter, who hopes to bring an attacking style he boldly declares is “unlike anyone else’s in the world”.
So what does that entail? Put it this way, he enthusiastically endorses the description of it by a journalist who had watched his teams at Hamburg as “heart attack football”.
High press, high energy, high reward is the long and short of it.
It will be fascinating to see how it plays out in one of the competitive leagues in Europe.
Walter is a intriguing hire, pitching up in England after stints as a youth coach at Pep Guardiola’s Bayern Munich before progressing to manage Holstein Kiel, Stuttgart and Hamburg.
It is the 48-year-old’s last posting that piqued the interest of Acun Ilicali, the high-profile Hull owner who tired of predecessor Liam Rosenoir’s more cautious style.
Despite successive promotion play-off defeats his Hamburg team scored 202 goals over his 104 games in charge.
Over three years in the job he accrued a +61 goal difference and that was not by accident.
But will the same style work in East Yorkshire and lead Hull to a return to the Premier League after a nine year absence?
During a fascinating morning this week, i was given behind-the-scenes access to Walter’s work-in-progress.
As part of his pre-season programme he has broken the pitch into thirds.
The first fortnight was spent on the defensive third, the second on the attacking third.
Now they are working on the middle third, in Walter’s words, “trying to find solutions but keeping to their principles”.
“Conquer the ball” is one of this favourite phrases. His players are told to get straight back into counter pressing mode as soon as they lose the ball. Take risks, he continually tells them.
It’s remarkable for a manager in the middle of pre-season to be so open about his preparation but Walter isn’t worried about giving the game away.
“There are no secrets. I am open like a book because I know that what I do, nobody else in the world does it. Nobody can copy it,” he tells i later in his office.
“I don’t have a big influence, it’s all myself, it’s my style, it doesn’t matter if other people don’t like it. I play possession in a different way. Of course we are all trying to get to the same goal: winning. But I do it in my own way.
“My style is more fluid. It’s from the back to the forward and not dropping back from the front to the back.
“You normally have players between the lines, like the number eight or central midfielder, and they drop back to get the ball but they do it in a closed body position.
“I want them to stay open, in an open body position, and step into the ball and not come from the front to the back [to receive it]. If you go to your own goal you’re always in a closed body position so I try to bring everything to the front.
“Laying back and waiting for another team to make a mistake is not how I like to play. I’m not a reactive manager, I try to think about offence.
“Maybe you make more mistakes that way – somebody said to me that’s more risky – but it’s all about courage and self-confidence.
“At the beginning you might see more mistakes but I’m open to it if they make mistakes. If they make mistakes, it’s me who makes mistakes. That’s what I told them from the start. They have to be brave, they have to be convinced and making mistakes is how they learn.
“I told them if they do it like that I’ll be the happiest gaffer they can have.”
Walter admits his philosophy requires most of the players to be “reprogrammed”, one of the reasons he is holding two two-hour sessions a day through the summer.
The flat screen TV on the training ground canteen announces to the players the second one starts at 2pm and it will be more more technical, focusing on tactics.
It’ll also be a bit less physically intense but Walter admits there is a psychological element to these “two-a-days”. Encouraging players to push to their limits and maintain focus as limbs weary is key.
“It’s creating a mentality. You have to go out, you have to step over a point even if you’re tried you have to do it again. You go out with your heart full and with the intention to develop,” he says.
“That’s the mentality you need across the whole league, over the whole year because it is a very demanding league.”
And the hard work is combined with morale-building off it.
On Wednesday the squad decamped to the local David Lloyd centre for a tennis tournament, Walter paired with Lewie Coyle in the doubles. He declines to say how they got on.
“It’s the part of the job I love. I love being around the players, I want them to be happy to come to the club and to create a family here,” he says.
“I try to be normal with everyone here, I try to treat all the staff the same. We all work hard, we’re all important and just because I’m the gaffer I’m not better than them.”
Local optimism at a bold appointment has been tempered somewhat by a summer of major upheaval at the MKM Stadium, Rosenoir’s exit preceding an exodus of players and the return of high-profile loan signings like Fabio Carvalho and Liam Delap to parent clubs.
Trust remains high in popular owner Ilicali – who has invested heavily in Hull – but after the departure of Jacob Greaves and Jaden Philogene there is no escaping the fact the squad needs additions and fast.
Pre-season defeats have set alarm bells ringing for some supporters and even though Walter isn’t worried, fielding a youthful side at Doncaster in midweek was a reflection of his limited resources.
“We need more players but they have to be the right players,” Walter admits.
“If you don’t get the right players in for my philosophy [it is no good]. To get the right players to play under me maybe you have to take a closer look, talk more to them.
“Maybe if you know a player is a good crosser or a fast winger that’s enough for some managers but for me it’s more so it’s more difficult to find a player, especially at the back, where we need to find someone who is stepping in, who is dribbling, who is brave. Or maybe a full-back who is playing more than a central midfield.
“It’s a hard job but it’s fun! Finding the right players – it’s the most important job in the world to me.”
The size of the rebuild still to be carried out should not be underestimated.
Walter believes the number of new arrivals still required extends to double figures, with “up to five” coming in on loan.
“At the moment we have eight or nine players, the rest are young, they have a good quality but need time to develop, especially for the Championship. So we need, maybe, 10 more,” he says. He has “confidence” Hull’s transfer team will deliver.
On the day i visits, a triallist goalkeeper is being put through his paces. There is interest, too, in Wigan Athletic’s promising England Under-21 centre-back Charlie Hughes.
If it feels like things are still up in the air on-the-field, Walter’s office reflects that.
He apologises for the untidiness and there’s an open suitcase on one of the chairs and a tube of toothpaste on the desk.
He is working long hours – “I’m a football obsessive,” he admits – and living in a nearby hotel that is a short drive from their training base. His family are due to join him in England in November.
“It’s hard not to be with them, I miss the warmth of them around. But that’s football, it’s the same everywhere,” he says.
He signed a three-year deal and says he’s it in for the long-term, with the Premier League his aim.
Cynics might point to Turkish media mogul Ilicali sacking Rosenoir as proof Hull is a poisoned chalice but Walter says he is on the same page as the ownership.
“At the beginning, before I took the job, I had a really good conversation with them and it was open,” he says.
“I’m not 100 per cent German so maybe that fits better for the Turkish mentality. My grandfather was Hungarian and my other grandfather was Ukrainian so I have kind of different mentalities in myself too.
“Maybe I find it easier to open myself up to the South Eastern mentality like the Turkish and we have an open relationship with the management, we talk a lot to each other, trust each other and if we have a different opinion on something I’ll tell them. They like that and I like it that way.”
For neutrals it will be fascinating to watch it play out.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/dtXx1rg
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