BRASILIA, June 16 — The trusty beige raincoat is gone but Ottmar Hitzfeld is clearly wily as ever as the veteran Switzerland coach showed in the 2-1 Group E win over Ecuador.
Hitzfeld’s two substitutes scored the goals as his team overcame a 1-0 halftime deficit to record their first-ever win over South American opposition at a World Cup at the sixth attempt.
Admir Mehmedi equalised three minutes after replacing the ineffective Valentin Stocker at halftime and Haris Seferovic, who came on in the 75th minute for Josip Drmic, grabbed the winner with the last kick of today’s game.
“Ottmar has developed a very, very good feeling as to when he has to react,” Hitzfeld’s Switzerland predecessor Kobi Kuhn told the Swiss newspaper Blick.
Hitzfeld has, by choice, slipped out of the limelight since he took charge of Switzerland six years ago and it is easy to forget that at club level he is one of Europe’s most successful coaches.
The 65-year-old, who retires after the World Cup, won the Bundesliga a total of seven times, with Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, and the Champions League once with each, making him one of only five coaches to win the trophy with two different clubs.
He prepares for matches with the meticulous precision which might be expected of a qualified maths teacher and his management of the players is so good that former Daimler-Chrysler chief Juergen Schrempp once described him as a role model for German business leaders.
In Germany, he is best remembered for a six-year stint at Bayern where he managed to put an end to the petty squabbling that had bedevilled the club and won four Bundesliga titles in five seasons.
He returned for another stint in 2007-8, winning another Bundesliga title, but by that time he wanted a quieter life and gratefully accepted to challenge of coaching Switzerland, where he spent much of his playing and early coaching career.
Since then he has faced very different challenges in his new role such as instilling self-belief, which has often been in short supply, and nurturing the talents of an outstanding generation of players, nearly all of them second generation immigrants.
After Switzerland failed to qualify for Euro 2012, Hitzfeld decided it was time to give the younger players their chance and the move paid off as they went through World Cup qualifying unbeaten and beat Brazil in a friendly.
He invariably wears a beige raincoat on the touchline, although he dispensed with it in the dusty, dry climate of Brasilia, which adds to his generally unglamorous image.
He rarely loses his temper and prefers not to say anything at all when he is upset. “When I’m totally silent, it’s a bad sign,” he once said. “That’s when I can become dangerous.” — Reuters
