Hannover counterattack their way into the Bundesliga's rarefied spheres

On average, they have 46% of possession, only Köln (15th) and Gladbach (18th) manage less. Their 'one-v-one' stats – Zweikämpfe, they call it in Germany – are the second-worst in the Bundesliga. No team misplaces passes more often. No team creates fewer chances. It is, in other words, quite easy to explain why Hannover 96 are not the best team in the German top flight. How come they are the third-best, though? Professional code breakers would struggle to make sense of these numbers.

Take Friday's match against struggling Stuttgart in the AWD-Arena. The visitors had more possession (55%). They had more shots on goal, completed more passes, won most of the Zweikämpfe. Yet everyone agreed that Mirko Slomka's men had outplayed the Swabians in the process, and that Didier Ya Konan's brace either side of a header from VfB centre-back Georg Niedermeier was but the logical culmination of the hosts' superiority.

Hannover, you see, are just not interested in keeping the ball. Nor do they care for sweeping, collective attack moves. Slomka has decided that their lack of quality attacking midfielders would be best addressed by bypassing the midfield altogether. What they're trying to do is to win the ball fairly, early, and then hit the strikers with long through-balls as quickly as possible. More often than not, they cannot be found. But when they do get in, the goalscoring opportunity is usually so good that the 96ers take it. Slomka, a coach who seemed ever so slightly out of his depth at Schalke, has turned one of the most average sides in the league into the shiniest, devastating counterattacking machine.

"We settled on this style of play, it's the foundation of our success," the 43-year-old told spox.com last week. He explained that the summer break had given him time to really practice that system, it was unlike the traumatic season before, when Robert Enke's death and the resulting paralysis in the team saw them scrap against relegation until the last day of the campaign. "We couldn't take the necessary steps then, but this year, we could impart our ideas more intensively," Slomka said.

According to Süddeutsche Zeitung's slightly bewildered northern correspondent Jörg Marwedel, Hannover's improbable venture into rarefied spheres owes much to "their great team spirit"; Slomka, he says, has managed to turn professionals that were booed as "mercenaries" by their own supporters at the beginning of the season (when Hannover crashed out of the cup against fourth division SV Elversberg) into a tight unit. Portuguese midfielder Sergio Pinto agrees. "I've never seen a team a team pull together this much, we are so homogenous," said the 30-year-old. "That never happened here before here."

Pinto, for years a run-of-the-mill work pony, has been so good this year that a call-up to the national side no longer seems out of the question. Other key players? Self-styled "mad dog" Emanuel Pogatetz has stopped going for people's legs and become a big asset at the back in his first season in Lower Saxony. Pinto's partner in central midfield, Manuel Schmiedebach, is a non-stop runner with an eye for the vertical pass. Slomka has even managed to whip Jan Schlaudraff and €4.5m flop Mike Hanke into shape again.

Then there's Ya Konan. The Ivorian came for relatively little money from Rosenborg, and is precisely the kind of striker "blessed with pace and agility" (Slomka) that's needed for counter-attacks. Their reactive system that doesn't always make for the prettiest football but in terms of effect, Hannover are like the hey-day Rock Steady Crew: opponents are forever getting hit on the break. In Finnish striker Mikael Forssell, they even have their very own (faux-)b-boy sending street-lingo shout-outs to the world via Twitter. "Gotta be sharp an fresh like an albino snow-ninja if I get on," he tweeted before the game. "I'll save my energy by not moving my ass at all this morning … Cause I need my energy for the bench later on." A few hours later he was "in da bus on the way to our stadium the AWD-Arena … playing Stuttgart … they need a bitch-slap to the face … I think we can deliver that!!!"

They did. The 2-1 win was the fifth in the row for 96, who, like Forssell tweets, have developed a taste for amassing three points in unlikely places. It's already the best-ever first half of the season in the history of the club. And they are only two points of short of 2009-10's total tally of 33.

Hannover's success is all the more remarkable if you consider the inauspicious start of Slomka's reign 11 months ago. He lost his first six games in charge and fell out quite spectacularly with the sporting director, Jörg Schmadtke. The two have been at each others throats ever since. Schmadtke, not the easiest man to get along with in the first place, has continually doubted the manager's tactical acumen in front of reporters, and he also took personal offence when Slomka was hailed as Hannover's saviour at the end of last season. Slomka, for his part, tried to explain away defeats by pointing out mistakes in the transfer market. It turns out that both men are rather better at their jobs than they give each other credit for. President Martin Kind wants to extend their contracts as soon as possible but in a dig against Slomka, Schmadtke has voiced doubts. "In euphoria, the biggest mistakes are made," he said on Friday.

Others are happy to enjoy the good times, however. "Everything is possible now," said Ya Konan after the match. The 26-year-old unfortunately picked up a knee injury and might now miss the 14 January restart.

While Slomka is cautioning against talk of Europe ("we need to reproduce our form next year first"), the local edition of Bild is less restrained. "Are the Reds ready for Tottenham, Inter or Valencia?" the tabloid wondered breathlessly. The answer, it must be said, is probably "no". And Hannover, for all their progress this season, probably wouldn't stand much of a chance either.

Talking points

Stuttgart's defeat saw the unsurprising end of their manager Jens Keller: the 30-year-old was fired on Saturday. It spoke volumes of the nervousness of the VfB officials that Bruno Labbadia, the third coach this season, entered the club HQ via a backdoor. Reporters had been asked to keep the exact location and time of his unveiling secret. Alas, the feared protests from supporters didn't materialise. Labbadia, who crashed and burned spectacularly at Leverkusen and Hamburg after excellent starts, is an interesting choice, perhaps the perfect match even: a club who fires every manager after one year meets a manager who always gets fired after one year. Stuttgart gave him a contract until 2013 but are obviously more concerned with avoiding a short-term disaster: "There's an almost apocalyptic fear that they will have to inaugurate the new, pure football stadium in the second division," wrote Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Bruno, though, is an optimist. Fittingly for the best-coiffured man in German football, he was channelling Hair on the podium. "I hope that we can let the sun shine again in half a years' time," he chirped on the podium.

Labbadia's successor at the Volksparkstadion, Armin Veh, won't see that many more sunsets on the HSV bench, however. His side were so abject in the 4-2 home defeat against Leverkusen that the result was utterly deceiving. After spending much of the past few weeks having a go at the players and their mistakes, Veh has now changed his tune. "They're afraid, there's no point to knock them down. We are all on the floor, including me," he said. The supporters are yet to realise the full scale of the coach's ineptitude and shouted "Vorstand raus!" (Board out!) instead. Or perhaps they actually see things quite clerarly, like Frank Rost, who made some interesting remarks after the final whistle. "Do you know The Sorcerer's Apprentice?" the well-read keeper asked the TV interviewer after the final whistle. "That's how it is at Hamburg." Rost was probably not referencing the proto-trippy Walt Disney classic Fantasia but Goethe's poem about an apprentice who gets a broom stick to do all the work but then fails to control the spell with disastrous consequences. Future German A-level candidates might be asked to decipher Rost's exact meaning but the ad hoc interpretation has president Hoffmann as the hapless wannabe sorcerer and Veh as the overeager but useless broom. But who will step in to put both of them out of their misery?

Happier days in Munich: Bayern were celebrating "Schweinachten" at the weekend, as Bild would have it. The Germany midfielder turned Santa in the immediate aftermath of the 3-0 win over gutsy but ultimately harmless St Pauli. "I have signed a new five-year deal, for you," he told the supporters in the Allianz Arena with a microphone in the centre circle. His heart was beating "in red", he claimed in front of reporters later, and he wanted "to start an era" in Munich: "It's more beautiful to win the Champions League with Bayern rather than Real Madrid or Inter." Both clubs had, coincidentally, been the most serious bidders for his signature. President Uli Hoeness was less emotional. "You can forget about players of this calibre saying 'I love the club, I will make concessions'. One has to put a lot of money on the table and that's what we did. According to educated guesses in the local media, Schweinsteiger was given €45m good reasons to keep playing in Bavaria. That's the equivalent of £145,000 per week.

The 26-year-old's decision stay was widely interpreted as a vote for confidence for Louis van Gaal, too, who's not quite out of the woods yet, if murmurs of discontent at Säbener Strasse are to believed. The Dutchman still doesn't see eye to eye with Franck Ribéry (scorer of the third goal), for starters. The Frenchman complained about a "lack of freedom" on the pitch before the match, only to be slapped down afterwards. "If he wants to play by himself, he should go and play tennis," said Van Gaal.

"I often had 43 points," said Jürgen Klopp, "but never this early in a season." Dortmund, you guessed it won yet again, albeit in slightly different fashion: in addition to all their hard running, excellent organisation and great attacking play there was a Meisterschale-sized piece of luck, too: Werder striker Pizarro was unlucky not to win a penalty when the Aston Villa target Roman Weidenfeller barged into him in the second half. The rest was a formality though. Nuri Shain and Shinji Kagawa scored. "We don't talk about euphoria or taking it easy, we will continue work hard like animals," promised Klopp.

Results: Hannover 2-0 Stuttgart, Hoffenheim 1-1 Nürnberg, Hamburg 2-4 Leverkusen, Bayern 3-0 St Pauli, Dortmund 2-0 Werder, Kaiserslautern 0-0 Wolfsburg, Köln 1-0 Frankfurt, Freiburg 3-0 Gladbach, Schalke 1-0 Mainz.