‚Important to finish the season in fifth place‘

Several people here place an enormous amount of trust in me. For a head coach, the direct sporting superior is the most important person to confide in. Paul and I have had an incredibly high degree of common ground in many areas from day one. That was the most crucial element for me. But it wasn’t just Paul; the entire club environment gives me the feeling that the club is willing to develop further. You can feel that in the newly elected board and also in the office. With all the employees, you get the feeling: This is a club where everyone is ready to continue. I’m someone who likes to develop further. That’s why I extended my contract with complete conviction and full of energy. Furthermore, we feel incredibly at home here as a family. It has become a club and a place close to my heart. Everything just fell into place. I’m looking forward to what’s to come.

Münster is an opponent fighting for everything. For us, in terms of the standings, it’s „only“ about fifth place, which would still be a fantastic result. Münster is in an extremely difficult position. They need to win their last two games and hope for some other results. They will do everything they can to make that happen.

Basically, since the coaching change, their game has shifted from short passing to more long balls. Add to that set pieces from all angles. They will certainly try to put us under pressure. This clashes with our current personnel situation, where many of our automatic plays are simply unavailable. Nevertheless, we will try to play a very proactive game. We are facing a team with quite a few question marks regarding their approach, but we know their mental state, and that will be: all in for Münster.

A drop in intensity must be prevented, and this will therefore be actively addressed. It’s incredibly important for us to finish the season in fifth place and end it with a win. The season was far too good to go into the summer break feeling like this.

Even with seven or eight players unavailable, we will field a team that has the ambition to win in Münster. That’s my ambition as well. I will definitely put the best possible team on the pitch.

While this is a personal accolade, which I don’t generally place too much importance on, it can be significant if viewed as a representative team achievement. We have the second-strongest attack in the league, and Isac is just one goal behind in the top scorer rankings. This is certainly a topic of discussion for Isac, but also for all of us, because we define ourselves through our attacking style of play. Therefore, our goal is to finish as high as possible in both of these categories. We would like to help Isac become the league’s top scorer and perhaps even have the best attack in the league. These are our objectives.

To say it’s just a coincidence would be too simplistic for me. But I stand by my statement 100 percent that we’ve made great strides forward in the areas of medicine and performance. Nevertheless, if you look at the raw numbers, our outcome isn’t that great. Still, we have to look at what happened. Mey, for example, leaves the KSC game saying everything’s fine, and the next morning he has a swollen knee. That has nothing to do with treatment or management.

What we need to continue improving is working hand in hand in all areas. Many of these things were just bad luck. But if there’s even one injury that wasn’t bad luck, we have to try to prevent it from happening again. The entire Darmstadt 98 organisation has had to learn new ways of working, thanks to Paul and me, and we’ve already implemented a lot of that. We need to continue learning how to optimise processes.

But we’ve also brought a lot of players up to a very robust level this year. When I look at Hiroki Akiyama’s development in this regard, these are steps that we were not able to take last year.

It’s nonsense to say something like this isn’t an issue. It’s normal to think about it. But a standout quality of this team is that they’re a cohesive unit. No one will hold back because of their own personal interests. The game against Elversberg, for example, demonstrated this: putting in such a tremendous effort while playing with a man down. The lads give their all and are fully committed until the very last moment. It’s perfectly normal that they’re also thinking about their futures in their private lives.

It offers the advantage of planning certainty, even though I would have preferred to forgo this certainty for now. A potential promotion would likely have necessitated an adjustment to our playing style. Now it’s perfectly clear which players we want to sign and what changes we want to make to the squad. Overall, we were able to intensify internal discussions last week.