By Chris Wright
All the fun of the fair: Stadion Bruhl, home of FC Grenchen
FC Grenchen have been suffering a rather rough time of it recently in the Swiss fourth tier, having shipped 66 goals and picked up precisely zero points over the course of their last nine games – the most recent being a humiliating 10-0 loss against FC Lucerne’s youth team.
Indeed, with 14 games of the season now played, Grenchen sit bottom of the league with just five points to their name, having conceded a total of 80 goals while managing to score a paltry ten at the other end of the pitch.
Alas, the Lucerne defeat proved to be the final straw for Grenchen’s sporting director Renato Brun, who decided to finally wield the axe after the game.
However, as is usually the done thing, Brun did not sack the manager – rather he sided with head coach Patrick Boesch and instead decided to sack all 11 players that played against Lucerne.
Brun, who has only been in the job since September, told AZ Solothurn: “It sounds brutal, but these players are not good enough for this league,” before insisting that the 11 sackings had mainly been made for “sporting reasons” but for “one or two character reasons, also”.
“I am the head of sport and there to do something when [the club] is not running smoothly,” he added. “I am one who talks less and does more.”
Tough to argue with that.
Coach Boesch also went on record stating that he has no issue with Brun’s unceremonious decimation of his squad: “It works well and is not an issue. Others would have long since chucked in the towel in his situation.”
The only problem being of course, that the 11 players who were released into the wild after Saturday’s defeat aren’t best pleased, with defender Dedaj Dugagjin complaining of “character assassination” after the names of the 11 axed players were reportedly put up on a list at Grenchen’s training ground and told to clear their desks.
That said, it seems Brun and Boesch retain the full backing of Grenchen’s executive committee, who held an emergency meeting after the Lucerne game.
When asked about the dramatic multi-man lay-offs over the weekend, committee member and club sponsor Rolf Probst simply replied: “The club management does a super job. We do not interfere in sporting decisions.”