Erik ten Hag’s sacking is a brutal end to historic failure at Bayer Leverkusen | Bundesliga

“You say it best, when you say nothing at all,” was how Ronan Keating put it in a 1999 cover version. Whether Erik ten Hag will choose to get over his latest breakup with a tub of ice-cream in front of a rewatch of Notting Hill is open to conjecture but if he did, lyrics dotted through the film are sure to have an added poignancy.

Ten Hag didn’t need telling that in only his second Bundesliga game in charge of Bayer Leverkusen, they and he had a bad afternoon. Going to a diminished and depleted Werder Bremen (it is probably too early to say lowly, even though we strongly suspect that is the part of the table where they may end up spending most of their time), The workself appeared to be on top of things, holding a 3-1 lead and a man advantage.

Not so. A first senior goal for the 18-year-old Karim Coulibaly, deftly poked in from just inside the six-yard box after a chaotic spell of pressure, gave the home side a wildly celebrated and barely believable leveller. As this was the last image of Ten Hag in Leverkusen, Coulibaly’s surprise intervention – he was drafted in from the under-19 team for a first start after a slew of injuries – will feel like the full stop, the moment that pushed the coach over the edge.

That will not quite be true. It has been a brutal end and a historic failure, for both coach and club, with no Bundesliga club ever having appointed a new coach and then removed him after two games. Yet for anybody around Leverkusen in the buildup to the trip to Bremen, it can’t be said to have been a surprise. It was evident that for Ten Hag’s second Bundesliga game in charge (yes, it bears repeating), he was already under enormous pressure not just to produce a result but to produce a performance, some evidence of direction and leadership in the team’s on-field efforts.

None of those things were forthcoming. If Leverkusen had escaped the Weserstadion with a win, it would have been just that. It had been, in the words of the captain Robert Andrich, “misery versus misery”, an entertaining spectacle but not one of high class and not one where Ten Hag’s team had really looked like bringing their superior quality to bear. Andrich was the only Leverkusen player to come forward and face the media afterwards but that’s all that was needed. The Germany midfielder is always direct and clear, and he was here.

“What happened then is emblematic of our current situation,” he fumed. “We have too many people who are preoccupied with other things, too many who are only concerned with themselves, and that’s what the game looked like. Everyone played for themselves.” Some of this had been clear, not least in the unseemly dispute over who should take the penalty that Patrik Schick eventually scored to make it 3-1. Schick and Exequiel Palacios argued, Andrich stepped in to settle it and gave the ball to Schick – “We can’t stand around on the pitch and play rock-paper-scissors for two minutes,” was how the skipper framed it – and Palacios then kicked the ball away in frustration.

If Andrich had reason to bring the blame on to the players, it said little for Ten Hag’s authority, as the coach himself implicitly conceded in his post-match press conference. “It was very clear who the [penalty takers] were and they simply didn’t implement that,” he said, describing the situation as “unacceptable”. But if Ten Hag’s own words had little impact, Andrich’s did. Just as his words describing the squad’s shortcomings had prefaced the fall of Gerardo Seoane, which led to the appointment of Xabi Alonso.

Andrich’s words cut through because of the content, because of his delivery and because of their solitude. Both the sporting director, Simon Rolfes, before the game, and the chief executive, Fernando Carro, had been given opportunities to publicly back Ten Hag but they had declined to take them. Their nothing at all, to recall the ballad, said it best. Whatever the result in Bremen, it was really hard to imagine anything turning the tide.

For if they had been bad in Bremen, they had been truly atrocious the week before in the curtain-raiser against Hoffenheim. Even that, though, could be argued to be more symptom than cause when we look at the fall of Ten Hag. Nobody is suggesting that the former Manchester United coach was dealt anything other than a difficult hand, with over €200m worth of player sales this summer and the loss of key leaders like Lukas Hradecky, Jonathan Tah and Granit Xhaka besides.

Even if one takes into account the good reputation that Ten Hag enjoyed in Germany from his previous association with Bayern Munich, he began on the back foot not just because he followed Alonso or took charge of a changing squad at the end of an era, but because he wasn’t first choice. The club thought at one point they had a deal for Cesc Fàbregas to replace his former international teammate, but Como weren’t for turning and Fàbregas was not keen on forcing.

From there, the PR disasters kept pace with the player exits. There was the infamous 5-1 defeat to Flamengo’s under-20s on a promotional tour of Brazil, aimed at continuing Leverkusen’s eager global brand expansion. Ten Hag could have reacted in many ways but while acknowledging that the result shouldn’t have happened, the headlines became his lines that “the game came too soon” and that he “couldn’t give a shit about results in pre-season”.

It kept coming. The Xhaka exit was perhaps a turning point, not because Leverkusen were losing an important influence of the rampantly successful Alonso era but because Ten Hag – inexplicably to the club – came out and publicly said that he didn’t want the Switzerland midfielder to go and aimed to keep him. Rolfes and Carro were blindsided, with the sporting director having described getting good money for an ageing player and key piece of a previous regime as “a win-win-win” and having discussed it (and from their perspective agreed the strategy) with the coach behind the scenes.

There was more: the all-new coaching team who hadn’t worked together before feeling disjointed and the lack of any real reaction to the Hoffenheim loss, after which the recently arrived Mark Flekken felt comfortable enough to tear his team’s performance apart publicly to journalists. It will be a busy transfer deadline day for Leverkusen with Eliesse Ben Seghir having already arrived from Monaco and more players of considerable stock to come. Those actions, and that a new coach will be tasked with guiding them into the top four, will say more than anything Rolfes or Carro could have in a statement.