Wagner is composing a Yorkshire symphony
PERHAPS a German succeeding in Yorkshire is not quite as surprising as it might appear. After all, the German culture of speaking your mind means that people can seem a little blunt at times. So it might explain why David Wagner is thriving at Huddersfield Town.
‘I like the persons here i n Yorkshire,’ he says. ‘Open, direct….’ Like his compatriots, perhaps? ‘Nearly,’ he replies with his customary big smile. ‘But they are not German. Everybody told me I am more direct.’
Direct, to the point and top of the Championship with six wins in the last eight games and a quarter of the season gone. Huddersfield owner Dean Hoyle took a chance last November on a ‘crazy German’ as Wagner himself puts it.
The reasoning was that the club had appointed British managers for 108 years, so to buck the trend, to succeed in the second tier, where, despite a subsidised wage bill, they will always be among the smaller clubs, they had to try something different.
That is how they ended up with the manager of Borussia Dortmund’s second team, who also happened to be Jurgen Klopp’s trusted friend.
Sceptics abounded when Wagner changed training to 3 o’clock in the afternoon, introduced double sessions on some days and overnight hotel stays before home games. More pertinently, they ended last season 19th — one place lower than when Chris Powell was sacked — with 4-0 and 5-1 defeats in their final two games. It didn’t look good for 2016-17.
A summer bonding trip kayaking in Sweden, living off the land, fur- ther raised eyebrows. ‘Isn’t it usual?’ says Wagner, of those who thought he would fail.
‘To be fair if I go in a restaurant I normally choose what I know I like. My wife is different, my wife always tries something new. What is special about this club and this chairman is that he thought: “I have to change something if I like to bring my club forward.”
‘Of course we are very happy. We can say we had a great start and this makes your chest bigger and gives you more selfbelief and confidence for whatever happens in the future.
‘They are early days but we have the feeling that yes we are on the right way. And not only we as a team, as a whole club. If you go in the city you feel the positive atmosphere.
‘It’s nice at the moment to be a Huddersfield Town supporter but we have to make sure that we are still hungry and greedy and work and ask more questions. We will not stand still, we like to go forward.’
His arrival coincided with extensive improvements to the town-centre training ground, the old ICI sports ground. It is rather charmingly still shared with members of the old sports and social club, meaning elderly members playing bowls can let players know what exactly they thought of the last performance.
Clearly these are early days but Wagner is already being linked to the vacant Aston Villa job and for now, all has gone well. Even that pre-season camping trip to Sweden, where they kayaked to an isolated island to fend for themselves, was an unexpected triumph.
‘I did it before with Borussia Dortmund and I said I would never do it again,’ laughs Wagner. ‘It was horrible. It was raining all day for four days — nothing special for the British. But if you are in a canoe for eight hours and it’s raining and then you have to build up a tent and it rains, you have to fish or make a fire in a rain…
‘But I was convinced it was something this group needs. We had so many new signings. The trip had the feeling of holidays this time. OK, holidays without a toilet, without electricity, without enough food, no good sleep.’
It is not surprising that some didn’t reckon much to Wagner on arrival. He was a good professional, playing with Klopp at Mainz and then in the Bundesliga with Schalke, where he won the UEFA Cup, though he was on the bench. He was a US international, by virtue of an American father, from whom his mother split when he was very young. ‘I was an average player. Or maybe even less than that,’ he says. Probed a little more, he concedes: ‘I was better than Jurgen,’ before adding, with that hearty laugh: ‘If the level is very low it’s not so difficult. No, no, no! It was just joking. He was a good full-back to be fair.’
But he knew nothing of English football and less of Huddersfield and the Championship before he came. ‘I had only been to the UK to go to Heathrow Airport to change flights when I go to America.
‘I had not even been to watch football or the usual London trip. For whatever reason it never happened before. I knew nothing about the club, about Huddersfield, Yorkshire. I didn’t know where Huddersfield was, in the north, south, east, west.’
And though his c.v. boasted the link with Klopp at Dortmund, Wagner was only in charge of the Under-23 team, having previously been a youth-team coach at Hoffenheim and before that a teacher, training at Darmstadt University in biology and sports science.
Ten years ago he had a classroom of teenagers to manage rather than a dressing room. ‘To be fair, I liked it, it was OK. The biggest problem was that I know that I have much more knowledge about football than biology, so it’s much easier in the dressing room.
‘But I never had a problem going into a room, delivering my ideas and trying to convince people that they follow [me]. In the end you have to know they are all humans and all desperate to learn.
‘You only have to make sure that you know every human is different and you cannot work with everyone on the same wavelength. You have to speak in different ways.’
His current classroom is proving receptive. ‘The players have been fantastic. We did something radical. When we see what has changed here with new offices, the new gym, we have developed into a more professional football club.
‘I have a lot more ideas for this club and I still have a feeling we are at the beginning of our journey.’