Ilia Gruev achieved six years ago what MSV Duisburg is currently only dreaming of. The second league promotion. On Saturday, the ex-coach visited his old club.

When Ilia Gruev last visited the Schauinsland-Reisen-Arena as an expert for Magenta Sport, MSV Duisburg was still leading the third-division table by a wide margin under Torsten Lieberknecht. The end of the 2019/2020 season is known, the promotion was squandered on the last meters.

Three years later, the 53-year-old returned to his old home, where he worked as a player from 2000 to 2004 and as a coach from 2015 to 2018. The highlight: the third league championship in 2017. Gruev was Duisburg’s last promotion coach six years ago. “It’s always nice to be here, memories immediately come flooding back – of promotion, of winning the Lower Rhine Cup or finishing seventh in the second division,” Gruev said before the 0:5 home debacle against Borussia Dortmund II.

What the former successful coach had to witness at the weekend no longer had much to do with the game of yesteryear and could not be surpassed in terms of error-proneness in the defense and harmlessness in the offense. It was the weakest performance of the current season. While the high defeat for Ziegner served as a hello-wake-up effect in the relegation battle, the withdrawal of main sponsor Schauinsland-Reisen was also a big topic at the weekend.

Senger and Müller expect reaction in Cologne

Gruev knows a thing or two about the sideshows in Duisburg, and the Bulgarian assesses the sporting development since his last visit to the Wedau as follows: “Of course, things aren’t going as we’d hoped. Four third-league seasons in a row have never happened in the history of this great club. I hope that in the future things will slowly go in the right direction again.”

That’s also what the players hope, for whom it’s a matter of showing the right reaction at FC Viktoria Köln in a week’s time after the embarrassing defeat against a direct competitor on Monday, so as not to get into even greater relegation trouble. Goalkeeper Vincent Müller was almost speechless after the Dortmund game. “It was extremely frustrating. We beat ourselves on standards. We have to deal with that quickly.” Own goal scorer Marvin Senger added: “A performance like that must not happen to us again.”

In the event of a Bayreuth win in Verl on Sunday afternoon, the gap to the bottom would be just four points.