Nürnberg are throwing it away

Nürnberg are not the worst team in the Bundesliga. They are playing like it. That is the scandal at the club, and nobody at the ground can pretend otherwise.

Nine games in, the side have four points. On the quality of the chances they create and concede, they should have ten and a half. That is nearly seven points gone. Seven points is the difference between the bottom of the table and mid-table comfort. The table says eighteenth. The chances say eleventh. One of those is lying, and it is not the chances.

The goals tell you where it goes wrong. Nürnberg have scored eight from chances worth nearly twelve. That is a finishing problem, cold and simple: the men in front of goal are snatching at it, scuffing it, making the hard chance look ordinary. At the other end it is worse. They have conceded twenty from chances worth fifteen. Five goals handed over by their own defending. You can call it bad luck if you like. I call it a defence that switches off and a team that pays for it every week.

Tim Roth has been in charge since June 2061. He has had time. Time to drill the back line, time to find a finisher, time to make the side harder to beat. Instead his team give away chances they should not and miss chances they should bury. That is coaching as much as it is nerve.

And there is noise around the place. Saša Bubalo has started none of the last two, his place in the defence gone to Vincent Marechal, and nobody at the club will say why. A settled back line is the first thing a struggling side needs. Roth has unsettled his.

Up front, the young Swede Oskar Johansson carries eyes on him wherever he goes. He has been watched closely and written up warmly, and the club will need him to turn that promise into the goals that keep them up. Nürnberg cannot afford to wait for him to grow into it.

The league does not wait either. Bayern München sit on 25 points from chances worth 20.5. Dortmund on 16 from 19.4. Leipzig, Wolfsburg, Hamburg, Frankfurt: all of them close to what their play deserves. Nürnberg are the odd one out, the side whose play and whose points have come apart.

They went out of the DFB-Pokal to Bayern in the derby. Fine. Nobody expected otherwise. The league is the thing. The league is where this team must stop missing and stop giving away, and do it fast.

Four points is relegation form. Ten and a half would be a season. Roth's job is to close that gap before the table becomes the truth.