After qualifying, all participants in the intermediate round of the indoor city championships in Essen have been determined. Organizer Günther Oberholz takes stock.
There was a new feature at this year’s indoor city championships in Essen: the top and regional league teams were seeded for the intermediate round, while the rest had to qualify. Not everyone was happy with the solution.
Twelve groups competed at the Sportpark am Hallo last weekend. Forecasting caught up with organizer Günther Oberholz and also spoke to him about the last-minute cancellation by Landesliga team Blau-Weiß Mintard.
Günther Oberholz, how satisfied are you after two days and almost 24 hours of soccer as the qualifying round of the indoor city championships?
“Overall, we as the organizing team are satisfied because we saw really fair games over both days. There were lots of goals, exciting games and close groups. But of course it’s clear that when the top league and national league are missing, the quality is also lacking a little.”
The qualifying round of the indoor city championship to read up on.
Will there be a repeat of the format?
“There are always pros and cons, and in this case we had to seed the teams due to the dates we were given. We’ll have to see if we want to do it again next year. That is still open-ended. If the hall times are available to us, we will probably do it as usual, without the seeded teams.”
Speaking of “seeding teams”. There was criticism that the district league teams could have been seeded as group heads so that they don’t knock each other out and there aren’t pure district league groups.
“Then at some point we’ll seed ourselves to death. If you just seed everything, it becomes uninteresting. For me, the appeal of an event like this is that anything is possible and every Oberliga and Landesliga team has to go through all three weekends. That’s why I’d generally prefer it if we always played as normal and then see how far each team gets. At the end of the day, the best team wins.”
[b]Of the regional league teams, Blau-Weiß Mintard have now withdrawn at short notice.
“They didn’t withdraw at short notice, but, if I remember correctly, about a week and a half ago. It’s a shame, of course, because we were faced with the challenge of how to implement this. We then decided to break up a group of five. As a result, Rellinghausen is out of a group and takes the place of Mintard. Of course, it’s not pleasant when teams agree to take part in a tournament of this size and then leave a few days beforehand. I think we should be able to rule that out in future. “