After his last competitive game to date, Silvan Widmer has literally pulled the floor away. A month ago, in the quarter-finals of the European Championship, the Swiss and his national team were eliminated after a penalty shootout against Spain. “I came home with no energy left, “he says,” it was a whole new experience. And it took me a few days to regain my footing.”
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Help was approaching from Rheinhessen. The managers of FSV Mainz 05 had already tried to find the right-back of FC Basel before the European Championship and intensified the talks during the tournament. Other clubs have also expressed interest, but only in the talks with 05 sports director Martin Schmidt and coach Bo Svensson, he felt from the beginning, “that they absolutely want me. And since the moment I signed the contract, the anticipation of the new challenge has prevailed.”
Like the other European Championship participants from the squad of the Bundesliga club, Widmer only entered the season preparation for the training camp in Tyrol, so is still a bit behind. Nevertheless, it can be assumed that he will be on the right wing and will already be part of the first eleven in the DFB Cup game at SV Elversberg next Sunday as well as a week later for the league opener against RB Leipzig. An indication of this was the last test match of the Mainz on Saturday against the CFC Genoa – at 3: 2 in the over 2 × 60 minutes game, the new entry was in the starting lineup.
” What’s he doing?”
Widmer himself describes his career path as atypical. The reason: after his youth at FC Aarau, he moved to Udinese Calcio in Serie A as a 20-year-old, became a regular player, but returned to Switzerland after five years, now to Basel. “Some asked themselves at the time: What is he doing there?he says. “In hindsight, I can say that it was a great move.”Because in Basel he had developed, played more than 20 times in Champions and Europa League, he had matured “and now definitely ready to make the step into a big league”.
Widmer seems to be well prepared for his new employer for two reasons. On the one hand because of the style of play. He is used to the 3-5-2 system preferred by Bo Svensson from the Swiss national team. “I also have the 4-4-2 on it, but the triple chain suits me more because I have the willingness to run to set offensive accents, but can also work backwards. We want to push up, quickly find the opponent’s goal, and I assume that I will be relatively much in the opponent’s half.”
On the other hand, the role of the 05s in the Bundesliga is similar to that of the” Nati ” at the European Championship. “We have a great team in Switzerland, everyone wants to play for it,” he says. In terms of the names, the German national team is to be classified higher, “but we have brought it as a team better on the pitch”. The situation in Mainz is comparable. Not a huge club, but a unit against which to play should be extremely unpleasant. “In the previous round, nobody wanted to play against Mainz because they knew it was going to hurt. So it should be in the new season.“
