Mellowing with age

For one moment last weekend, the Huub Stevens who earned the nickname "The Growling Dog of Kerkrade" put in a brief appearance.

"We were effective but we didn't play well - we only had six chances the entire game," the displeased Dutchman groused to reporters after Saturday's match against Nuremberg.

"But if you score four, then you have to be happy," Stevens was quick to add.

That brief statement concisely sketched out the arc of Stevens' career with the Royal Blues.

Stevens first tenure with the club, from 1996 to 2002, was the most successful in Schalke's recent history. He was a coach who spoke in brief, raspy outbursts, as though trying to masticate a handful of rusty 16-penny nails. And his first squad, nicknamed the "Eurofighters," took after him, scraping and sweating their way to the UEFA Cup title.

When he returned to Gelsenkirchen in the fall of 2011, he brought back his combative style of football. But the tone has been different.

"Of course I've changed," Stevens told DW Sports ahead of the Nuremberg game. "I'm older and more experienced. There's nothing I did before that I'd rule out now, but there are situations where you take more relaxed approach, or react to differently than you would have in the past."

Steven's new warmth even extends to the press. The Dutchman no longer approaches post-game news conferences like trench warfare with a sworn enemy. Instead he’s taken to bantering with reporters.

But his charming, idiosyncratic German (an attempt at a sample would read something like "You have to have balance in keeping the ball, and you have to have balance in losing it") often renders him, shall we say, difficult to understand.

So what is Stevens about? It helps to look at his past.

Setting priorities

In the Bundesliga Stevens will always be most closely associated with Schalke. But he's also had success with other clubs. He won the Austrian championship with Red Bull Salzburg, led Cologne, then in the second division, back to the top flight, and took Hamburg from acute relegation danger to a spot in international competition.

But his career has been full of involuntary stops and starts. Stevens was forced to resign from both Cologne and Hamburg to move back to Holland to be closer to his wife, who suffers from cancer.

"Believe me: if your health doesn't play ball, you got no chance," Stevens reflected. "You have to decide for yourself what's best. And it may be that you have to decide against something you really like to do."

Stevens’ experience - and his there’s-more-important-things-than-football attitude - makes him a fitting replacement for Ralf Rangnick, who resigned suddenly this fall after being diagnosed with burn-out syndrome. It's clearly influenced his decision to keep working with his predecessor's coaching staff of assistants - an unusual decision.

"These guys can't help it that their head coach got sick," Stevens explained. "We'll see about the future, but right now it's fun working with them."

Steady as she goes

Continuity has also been Stevens' motto when dealing with a squad assembled by various coaches with very different visions over the space of years.

"The team is confronted with its third coach in seven months so you can't change everything or throw it out the window," Stevens said. "The players have to feel comfortable. If you're new at a club and you get rid of everything the previous coach and the one before that did, I think you create an awful lot of confusion."

Schalke's record bears Stevens out. The team weathered Rangnick's departure without a drop in form, and it compensated for injuries to playmaker Jefferson Farfan and central defender Benedikt Höwedes to get the job done against Nuremberg.

The coach has made one typical personnel move. Spanish midfield dribbler Jose Manuel Jurado has fallen out of favor, and veteran hard guy Jermaine Jones, who had been all but hung on the sale rack, has seen his stock rise.

"It's down to him, not me - he's performing well," Stevens said of the resurgent US international. "I've always said that the coach isn't that important. Of course, the coach is important when it comes to tactics and keeping the whole thing together. But it's the players who have to try to play better. They're really more important than the coach."

Stevens would love to win the Bundesliga championship, a title he came within a heartbeat of capturing with Schalke in 2001. But when asked about the Royal Blues chances this year, the Dutchman says he doesn't think they can compete with teams like Bayern.

Those are realistic ambitions from a man who himself has become surprisingly humble - and likeable with age.

It's unclear whether Stevens has a plan for Schalke going forward in the future, or even if he thinks he'll stay with the club for many years to come. But with Schalke having remained steady through a potentially very difficult phase, club bosses will be happy to let the kinder, gentler version of Huub Stevens take things one day at a time.

Huub Stevens was interviewed by Barbara Mohr for DW-TV's Bundesliga Kick Off. The program airs Mondays and Tuesdays.

Author: Jefferson Chase
Editor: Matt Hermann