Peter Neururer knows a thing or to about losing a job. The Bundesliga coach has been sacked five times and resigned from three clubs.
A story he likes telling is how he was fired at Schalke 04 while heading for promotion from division two.
Called into president Guenther Eichberg's office, Neururer bounded in thinking he was about to be offered a two-year extension on his contract.
"The president sat there with a glass of wine and I said `something to celebrate? Good, I'll have one with you,'" Neururer relates.
"He then said there's nothing to celebrate," so I replied, "good, I'll drink one with you anyway." He then told me I was fired.
"I slapped him on the shoulder, saying `stop those sort of jokes, what's it about then.' But he was serious."
Neururer, 48, can see the funny angry man when he has to talk about this season's developments in the German Bundesliga. Four coaches have been sacked in five weeks and others have been put under unprecedented pressure.
Neururer believes the Bundesliga business is becoming brutal with all common decency trampled over.
He describes the dismissal of Ewald Lienen at Borussia Moenchengladbach as "perverse" and of Kurt Jara's sacking at SV Hamburg as "mean."
The deceit practised in Jara's sacking has been particularly offensive to many in the game, coming almost immediately after Hamburg club bosses had called a news conference to pledge their support for the Austrian.
All along they were negotiating with former Bayer Leverkusen boss Klaus Toppmoeller.
Just as worrying has been the win-or-be-sacked ultimatums issued to Dutchman Huub Stevens at Hertha Berlin and Belgian Erik Gerets at Kaiserslautern.
Both coaches are still just hanging onto their jobs. But after Hertha scrap through a mid-week cup match against Hansa Rostock by penalty shoot-out Stevens looked emotionally shaken up by his recent experiences.
Stevens, Gerets and Hanover's Ralf Rangnick -- after five matches without a win -- could easily join Lienen, Jara, Armin Veh of Rostock and Friedhelm Funkel of Cologne on the list of ejected coaches.
"I can't ever remember a situation where trainers were told to either win the next two games or be sacked," Neururer told Sueddeutsche Zeitung this week.
"I also can't remember the work of a trainer being discussed so publicly as it was with Lienen. One can say that there has been a coarsening of morals."
Stuttgart coach Felix Magath has also criticized the way coaches are now being treated.
Coaching dismissals are nothing new in the Bundesliga -- there have been more than 270 in the league's 40-year history -- but with the financial stakes of success or failure higher than ever before clubs appear to be panicking when results go wrong.
Magath, vice-president of the German Coaches Association, told Stuttgarter Zeitung that directors now believed the easiest thing to do was fire the coach.
But this policy often backfired, with it becoming difficult to build a team long-term or have any credible transfer policy, he said. Neither could handsome pay-offs ease the pain.
"Must a coach allow himself to be abused and insulted just for doing his job?" he asked.
Many are now questioning whether the intense gaze of the media is contributing to the hire-and fire mentality of Bundesliga clubs, with every small series of failures turned into a crisis.
The mass-circulation Bild newspaper had no qualms Friday about dubbing Schalke coach Jupp Heynckes "Don Flop" -- a reference to his time as trainer in Spain -- in listing all the mistakes he has allegedly made since accepting the job in the summer.
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung commentator Gerd Schneider said the tabloid press and television broadcasters were deliberately turning the supposed failure of coaches into a "shrill sideshow" to sell papers or increase viewing figures.
Even the public broadcasters had thrown off all their former caution and were helping to "overheat the climate." This was particularly embarrassing when they at the same time morally condemned the developments, he said.
Schneider feels Hertha Berlin's ultimatum to Stevens has removed "the last boundary of decency and form."
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier