“We’re focusing on us and our own game”

HSV made good use of the international break. Head coach Daniel Thioune gave his players two days off to clear their minds. Aside from that, the squad worked on some fine tuning in order to continue the recent good run against Hannover 96 this weekend. The side from Lower Saxony have had an even longer break than HSV, with their last two games being postponed due to coronavirus infections. As a result, Hannover last played a competitive match over four weeks ago. Will that be an advantage or a disadvantage to HSV? Or will it not matter? “First and foremost, we will focus on ourselves,” said Daniel Thioune at the digital pre-match press conference on Good Friday. #

Thioune also spoke about…

…the personnel: The break has done us good. It’s helped to clear our minds and get ourselves fully ready for the final weeks of the season. It’s also helped us physically – our injured players have returned during this period too. Toni Leistner is the only exception. We had to take him out of training a bit today after his long absence, so he won’t travel to Hannover. He’s the only absentee, though. Everyone else is in training and that means I’ve got a large group of players to choose from. Simon Terodde is available and will make the squad – we’ll have to see if he starts or comes on later on in the game. The same goes for other players coming back from their injuries. The lads who have played recently have done well, but we’re getting a lot of quality back. We’ll wait and see – after all, there’s still two days to go before the game.

...Hannover 96: We’re not sure what to expect from them because they haven’t played in such a long time. Hannover haven’t had a game in four weeks and coach Kenan Kocak kept changing the formation and style of play before that, so we don’t know what’s in store for us. It was the same in the reverse fixture: We had expected another side to press us high up the pitch and then they sat extremely deep against us. As a result, we’ll focus on ourselves and our game. We still know that 96 have some strong individuals and will also throw everything at us as a team. If they want to try and get into the promotion hunt, then they really need to win this game. We’re aware that they have the quality – they didn’t beat VfL Bochum and Fortuna Düsseldorf at home for nothing and also got a point against Fürth. It’s going to be a really exciting challenge.

“We have to be at our best to be able to win games.”

 

…the final stretch: We will go into every game full of optimism because we know the quality we possess. At the same time, we won’t allow ourselves to become overconfident because we’ll have to be at our best to win games. Of course, we can be confident after beating Heidenheim and VfL Bochum and playing well against Kiel and Fürth. Other teams at the top are playing consistently well and picking up points too, though. The international break has broken every side’s flow so it will be interesting to see how all the teams reacts. There are many different approaches during international breaks like this. Some teams play friendlies and do intensive training sessions, while we looked to recover more and work on detailed tactics, as well as reintroducing injured players into training. Because of that, I wasn’t that disappointed about the break, but now we’re excited for the action to get back underway and we want to take the three points back with us to Hamburg.