‚Focus on the next event week after week‘

We have a wealth of options in terms of personnel – not just in attack, but also in the holding midfield position and in central defence. Niklas Schmidt impressively demonstrated in Braunschweig what a quality player he can be for us. We’re not currently discussing central defence that much, but my appreciation for Vuko remains undiminished. Overall, our personnel situation is a luxury, but also a very positive one for us. And that speaks well of our squad planning in the summer and the improvements made by Paul Fernie in the winter.

It’s incredibly important for us as a coaching team to have rational parameters for our personnel decisions. These are based on the players‘ abilities and form, but it’s also about what we need against the specific opponent. For example, Fynn Lakenmacher started against Kaiserslautern because we needed a target man. In Braunschweig, our plan was to find more depth behind the defence with Killian Corredor. Furthermore, it’s the responsibility of the entire team to ensure that decisions for or against a player don’t negatively impact team cohesion.

We’re facing a very strong defensive team that has become much more stable in the second half of last season. They went into the season aiming for promotion and have a lot of individual quality in their squad – many top players like Itten, Muslija, Appelkamp, ​​Tanaka, plus a number of good centre-backs. Their footballing approach isn’t entirely clear, but they’re developing into a pressing team. Against Münster, they played very aggressively, man-to-man, while in Karlsruhe they used significantly more zonal and midfield pressing. We’ll prepare our team for both. Offensively, they rely primarily on their crosses, and with Itten, they have both the target man and one of the best box players in the league in the middle.

As in every second division match, we’re facing a tough opponent. For us, it’s crucial to create fast-paced attacking moves. That’s not so easy against Düsseldorf. Defensively, we need to protect our wings well to prevent crosses. At the same time, we need to have good man-marking in the box.

The team’s greatest strength is that we focus on the next event week after week. After the game in Braunschweig, our immediate focus was on Düsseldorf. After the game against Düsseldorf, it will immediately be on Dresden again. We’ve agreed on clear values ​​for how we want to interact with each other during the week. The players also made a clear commitment before the season to how we want to work together. We’re concentrating on how we want to work. Creating this culture takes time. Now it’s about maintaining this culture. But that’s not difficult at the moment because the team is fully committed to it.

We addressed the issue of throw-ins clearly. In Braunschweig, the goals we conceded and the scoring opportunities we missed didn’t arise because the opponent outplayed us or because we lost one-on-one duels. They resulted from our failure to execute the basics well. That was the most frustrating thing in Braunschweig. On the one hand, I have to give the team immense praise for how they dealt with everything surrounding and during the game and ultimately came home with a point. That was fantastic. Nevertheless, we simply can’t concede goals like that.