“Reflection of our first half of the season” | OneFootball

A round-up of the post-match reactions from Markus Krösche, Dino Toppmöller, Robin Koch and Ayoube Amaimouni-Echghouyab.

Board member for sport Markus Krösche: “The boys need to be able to deal with that. We have to do better as a defensive unit. We shouldn’t have lost our shape after they equalised, we became too frantic. We lost the good structure we had, and that just doesn’t work. You could say that the game was a reflection of our first half of the season: we’ve got quality up front and we look dangerous, but at the back we need to become more compact.”

Head coach Dino Toppmöller: “Stuttgart deserved to win. It was a gripping, entertaining game of football. It’s frustrating that we’ve only taken one point from our matches against two top-class teams. What we need to do now is make sure we get the points we deserve for all the effort we put in.”

Robin Koch: “Once again, we failed to defend properly until the very end and we conceded another late goal. We gave it our all over the 90 minutes and tried to defend everything, but we still ended up losing. It’s extremely hard to take.”

Ayoube Amaimouni-Echghouyab: “Obviously it’s nice that I was able to play for the first time and that I scored. I’ve run off the shoulder like that a few times already this season, but of course it would have been better if we’d won or drawn. We’ll work towards getting the win against Bremen but right now, the fact that we didn’t get any points is really tough to swallow.”