FC St. Pauli

Fabian Hürzeler on…

...the injury situation: "Simon Zoller is still sidelined and now has a slight cold as well. He's positive and we talk a lot. He's really looking forward to the second half of the campaign and so are we. Simon will use the time to get back to training without any problems. That's the prerequisite for getting back to full form."

...keeping the run going: "It's not about the run, it's about winning the game. It's an important game for us and we want to do all we can to win it for the fans. We've had a very intensive week of training in which the players have remained emotionally positive. We've done a lot of small game-related exercises focusing on winning personal duels. It's very important for me personally that we the perform the basics for winning a game in this league to the maximum of our ability. The lads have done that very well this week."

...the recent lack of effectiveness: "The players have high expectations of themselves and the team, as do I, but we have to know we're not perfectionists. If things had gone perfectly against Osnabrück, we'd have been 4-0 up after 30 minutes and 3-0 up at half-time against HSV. It's simply extremely difficult to achieve perfection in football. We have to accept that we'll make mistakes and suffer setbacks in games. The way we deal with them is more important for me. How do the lads cope, how do they react and what do we learn from it? We have to play our football for 90 minutes and not just in stages. Against Osnabrück we have to be honest and say we didn't bring our football or our identity to the pitch in a 20-minute spell. That's something we're working on and can have an influence on."

...opponents Wehen Wiesbaden: "We're up against a team who are very compact and defend well. I get the feeling they play for and not with each other. They're very dangerous from set pieces and have been unlucky in recent games. They've never lost by many. They're consistent in the way they defend and score goals. They know what they're good at and what they're not so good at, which is one of their strengths. They play simple, yet effective football. In Hyun-ju Lee, Ivan Prtajin and Thijmen Goppel, they have individual quality for going deep and getting in behind defences."

...comparisons with the 2021/22 season and the significance of this year's final game: "You can't compare the situations even though they might appear very similar from the outside. The structure of the team is different now, the style of play is different and so is the situation within the group. The players aren't thinking about how things were two years ago. It's all about the present and the next game, and I'm demanding they focus solely on the Wiesbaden game. The players don't need any extra motivation for the final game. They want to sign off from the fans with a win. The fans deserve it because of the support they've given us all year, home and away. There's no better feeling than going into the winter break with a win."

...the first half of the season: "We still have a game to play so I don't want to draw too many conclusions just yet. I can live with the performances and the way the lads are playing football and the intensity and the dominance they're showing, but not so much with the results. As a coach, I don't like a total of eight draws. I'm someone who wants to win every game, which takes us back to the subject of perfection. If everything had gone perfectly, we might have won six of the eight draws, though we can also say we didn't lose in drawing those games and had the stability not to concede an additional goal. We'll analyse the first half of the campaign in detail irrespective of the result against Wiesbaden."

Photos: Witters