“Made too many mistakes” | OneFootball

Board member for sport Markus Krösche, head coach Dino Toppmöller and captain Robin Koch assess the 4-3 defeat to Union Berlin.

Board member for sport Markus Krösche: “It was a deserved defeat, we played too naively at times. We played into the press, our defensive cover wasn’t good, we were hit on the break at our own stadium and lacked power going forward. It wasn’t a question of attitude or mentality, the spirit was right. We’re used to playing every three days. I won’t accept tiredness as an excuse. We just made too many mistakes and lost against an efficient team.”

Head coach Dino Toppmöller: “It’s a completely needless and frustrating defeat. You can’t win when you give the ball away easily so many times. We attacked with everything we had in the final half-hour, threw everything in and showed character, which was really good. That crucial bit of luck was missing and [Frederik] Rönnow made a number of good saves. We had good energy throughout, the substitutes did well. In the end it wasn’t enough, and we brought it on ourselves. That makes it a day to forget, as happens in football. Now we’ll rest for two days, dust ourselves down and look ahead to Gladbach.”

Robin Koch: “We made too many mistakes and gifted the goals. We tried everything at the end – you can’t fault the team’s effort. There were simply too many mistakes. Union are a very awkward team to play against, we knew that beforehand. Obviously we wanted to come away with the win on the anniversary [of the stadium] and celebrate with the fans. That didn’t work out, but we can always rely on the guys on the terraces. We saw that again. We already know what caused it. We have a longer week of training coming up. We’ll recover well first so that we can go into next weekend with fresh legs.”