“This has been the case all my life!”: Deniz Undav must rediscover his “I don’t give a shit, I’ll sort it out” attitude to overcome his creative crisis
Deniz Undav again achieves very little in VfB Stuttgart’s 1-0 defeat to Borussia Dortmund, and his statistics are alarming. But when he then speaks openly about his frustration, a special facet of his character finally shines through again, one that has always been part of his unlikely success.
Deniz Undav shook his head when his game against Borussia Dortmund ended after 63 minutes. He trudged slowly towards the bench, briefly slapped hands with Dzenan Pejcinovic and walked past Sebastian Hoeneß towards the dugout. He glanced quickly at the coach, who was shouting instructions on to the pitch and did not see him. Undav carried on, shoulders now drooping slightly, dutifully slapped hands with the people he passed, grabbed a drinks bottle and sat down on the bench.
A few minutes later, he could only watch as Dortmund, with their second shot on target and after their first genuinely successful move through Nico Schlotterbeck, Jobe Bellingham, Konstantinos Karetsas, Bellingham again and finisher Maximilian Beier, went 1-0 up in this rather laboured game.
About 30 minutes later, VfB had suffered their third defeat in the fourth Bundesliga game of the season and Undav, with 0 goals this season, 0 assists, 0.5 shots and 24.8 touches per game, was analysing his team’s poor start in general and his own in particular on Sky, talking out his frustration in the process.
"I have the feeling I’m too far back on the pitch. I’m too far back, then I have to run 40 metres forwards and I don’t get any balls there. In four games I’ve only had two chances," he said. Last season, he said, he had "held the line more and then was there at the right moment."
Who is responsible for Deniz Undav’s weak start to the season?
Anyone hearing not exactly quiet criticism of coach Sebastian Hoeneß in that is mistaken. Hoeneß has not changed Undav’s position at VfB, nor is he asking anything different of him than last season. Sebastian Hoeneß knows that is only possible to a very limited extent.
Deniz Undav’s greatest strength as an instinctive footballer, and plenty has been written about his improbable career in recent years, is that he is precisely not one of those modern, remote-controlled players who have had every possible and impossible run for every possible and impossible situation drilled into them at academy level.
His coaches can, of course, teach him things and give him tactical concepts. They can tell him which spaces they would prefer him to occupy and how, for example, he should work back defensively. Undav is still a professional footballer, even if he took an unconventional route to get there. His career is not built on chance.
But prescribe his runs? That would not work with Undav, that is simply not how his game works. Undav is not a "template footballer" but "an absolutely brutal instinctive footballer. He associated the game unbelievably well. He already knew what would happen on the pitch three steps later," two of his former youth coaches explained about player Deniz Undav in Spiegel during the World Cup.
That was when Undav had managed three goals and one assist in the first two group games against Curacao and above all against Ivory Coast, and it felt as though all of Germany could agree on Deniz Undav and his improbable rise (six years ago still a third-division striker, a little before that still living on 100 euros a month, 17-hour days between work and training and a 40-minute walk to work).
Deniz Undav, this likeable north German with Kurdish roots who "has to eat döner or burgers once or twice a week" for the sake of his peace of mind, for a few days looked like the man who could bring Germany their good mood back. For a very brief moment, everything really seemed possible, even that Undav could fire the Germany team to the World Cup title.
Even Julian Nagelsmann started him in the round of 32 against Paraguay.
What did Julian Nagelsmann say about Undav after the World Cup exit?
After the elimination on penalties, Nagelsmann publicly criticised only Undav. Or rather: one missed chance by Undav in the early stages of the match. "There we are four men alone in front of goal, we only have to square it, then we tap the ball into the empty net. Then Deniz somehow chips it to the far post. It’s a very simple action, there wasn’t much to it," said Nagelsmann.
Over the summer, that sentence would not let go of Undav, even though he is actually defined by a certain couldn’t-care-less mentality. "I kept thinking the whole time about whether our elimination was also my fault," Undav said before the start of the season in Bundesliga-Magazin.
He said he had not seen a team-mate in a better position in that situation, and there had still been 115 minutes after the missed chance to avoid penalties, and yet he kept asking himself: "Was it really my fault?"
Of course it was not. Of course nobody can know, except perhaps Undav himself, whether that missed chance, including Nagelsmann’s final parting shot, is still having an effect on the 30-year-old today.
Why did Jürgen Klopp not nominate Deniz Undav for the Germany team?
Right now, the fact is this: Undav has to cope with several professional setbacks that had seemed unthinkable before the World Cup. That was when seemingly everything came effortlessly to him, when he managed 19 goals and six assists in the Bundesliga and nine goals and two assists in 13 internationals. Then came the crisis with VfB Stuttgart, his personal goal drought and, on top of that, Jürgen Klopp initially leaving him out of the rebuilding of the Germany team after the World Cup debacle.
"Now I have to prove to a coach once again that I belong,” Undav said on Sky. That is "exhausting", he said, and specified: "He said the expectations are different. In the two games he saw, against Bayern and Cologne, I wasn’t good. You have to accept that. I was briefly disappointed because I thought that through the World Cup and the games in the national shirt I might have built up a bit of a buffer. That apparently isn’t the case. I have to prove myself again and show the coach once more that I belong. It is exhausting having to prove that to every coach, but I’ve done it often enough. I’m not one to mope, I’m not going to cry about it now. I was disappointed for five minutes and after that I looked ahead. I will give everything so that I can put myself forward in November."
Deniz Undav is defined by a "couldn’t care less, I’ll do it" mentality
When he was asked what exactly he meant by saying he was not one to mope, another fairly unique facet of him flashed up. "I speak openly, I don’t mince my words and I say what I think, negative and positive. I’ve often had problems and often had to prove myself. That’s how it has been all my life. No matter where I was, at the start it didn’t work out because people said my body language wasn’t right or I wasn’t a sprinter. But that’s how it has been all my life. Last year I made 39 goal contributions and my body language was the same. If you know me as a person, you know how to deal with that."
There it was again, that "couldn’t care less, I’ll do it" attitude that makes up a large part of his aura. If he rediscovers that on the pitch as well, there is probably no real need to worry about the rest of Deniz Undav’s career path.
