“We want to show what we’re made of”

Hamburger SV have one final game of 2024 remaining and it comes at home to SpVgg Greuther Fürth on Saturday in front of 53,000 supporters at the Volksparkstadion. Not only do the Rothosen want to use this setting to help them pick up the three points, but also to put in a good performance and show what they’re made of. HSV head coach Merlin Polzin made those objectives clear at his pre-match press conference on Thursday, whilst exuding a high degree of confidence, reliability and excitement to be coaching at a packed-out Volksparkstadion. In particular, the 34-year-old spoke in detail about... 

…the approach going into the last game of the year: We want to give it our all one final time and deliver a good performance. We need to support the people who come and watch us play through our actions, and give them a good feeling going into the winter break. Simply put, we want to show what we’re made of. Our focus is to keep improving the implementation of our tactics. We’ve worked hard and well at that this week. I want to see an amazing performance and, most importantly, get the three points

…the upcoming opposition: Under Jan Siewert, Fürth have been doing really well. They’ve been really improving both on and off the ball, and that’s what we’ve been focusing on. Their five-back defence, the way their defend with players who are willing to cover the hard yards will mean that a lot is demanded of us in terms of positioning. We’ve thought long and hard about this during the week and are well prepared, because we’ve also taken on board the lessons from the last game. The same goes for us when we’ve not got the ball. Fürth are known to have good attacking quality, such as players like Hrgota. We’ll need to be careful how compact we are in the middle and change up our pressing game. We want to try and get the fans behind us and create an energy. Equally, we’ll need moments in which we defend our goal and penalty box well, and these are things that we’ve worked on in the last three weeks..      

“It’ll be up to us to get the fans behind us in order to express that Volkspark feeling.”

…dealing with mistakes: The team is extremely self-critical, and naturally, isn’t happy that we’ve not been at the peak of our performance at the minute or that we keep making mistakes, like we did last weekend, that deny us a reward for otherwise good work. We’ve got a team that are currently processing a lot together with our coaching staff, and it’s all a learning curve. The standards we set at HSV are all about eradicating errors and improving. We’ve done lots of analysis in the week, and I’m convinced that we’ll do better next time. We’re in a situation at the minute where we want to let our actions do the talking. We don’t want to talk the talk, but rather walk the walk.

…the team’s strengths: The team possesses something which is crucial for success in football: a community that stands up for each other. A season is always a long process, and there are bound to be bumps in the road. It’s all part of the process if you want to be successful. We know that here at HSV, we’ve experienced a fair bit. However, we’re convinced that we’ve taken the right lessons away from these experiences. There’s a huge amount of potential in the squad, but we also need to show that over 90 minutes on a weekend. That’s our task. We’ve got a great stage to showcase this on Saturday: a sold-out stadium, in which every HSV fan will drive us forward. However, it’ll be up to us to get the fans behind us in order to express that Volkspark feeling.