Hyypia sacked as Leverkusen loses yet again
Print Edition
BAYER Leverkusen dismissed coach Sami Hyypia yesterday, a day after the club slumped to a 1-2 defeat against Hamburger SV that took its recent record to just one win from its last nine German Bundesliga games.
“After a lot of thought and because of the ongoing crisis we reached the conclusion that a change at this point could help us turn things around urgently,” Leverkusen CEO Michael Schade said in a statement.
The 40-year-old former Finland international, who took over at Leverkusen in 2012, is to be replaced until the end of the season by interim coach Sascha Lewandowski, with whom he had shared coaching duties in his first season in charge. Lewandowski returned to the youth team set-up at the start of the season, leaving the former Liverpool defender in sole charge.
Leverkusen, which reached the Champions League knockout stage this season, had again been a strong contender for a spot in Europe’s premier club competition for the first half of the season.
However, the team has imploded since the winter break, and has dropped from second to fourth with five games remaining. It now risks losing that place as well with VfL Wolfsburg, playing Borussia Dortmund later yesterday, a point behind in fifth. Borussia Moenchengladbach is a further two points back and Mainz one more behind with each of Leverkusen’s closest rivals having one more game to play.
It has also endured humiliating losses to Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League and second-division Kaiserslautern in the German Cup.
“It was a very difficult decision because Sami did a great job the past two years,” Leverkusen sporting director Rudi Voeller said. “The dramatic developments in the past few weeks, however, gave us no real choice. We want and must try everything to rescue this season.”
Assistant coach Jan-Moritz Lichte was also released.
Hyypia is the seventh coach to lose his job in the Bundesliga this season, following the dismissals of Bruno Labbadia and his successor Thomas Schneider at VfB Stuttgart, Thorsten Fink and his successor Bert van Marwijk at Hamburg, Michael Wiesinger at Nuremberg and Mirko Slomka at Hannover.
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