Polzin: “It’s a massive game”

Matchday 30’s primetime fixture in Bundesliga 2 sees Hamburger SV travel to FC Schalke 04 on Saturday night (20:30 CET). It’s a clash between two of the league’s biggest clubs and fan bases, though 10 places currently separate the two teams in the table. At Thursday afternoon’s press conference (17th April), HSV head coach Merlin Polzin discussed…

…this week’s training sessions: We’ve had a really good week of training. We clearly discussed the things we didn’t like about last week’s game with the team. We then quickly switched our focus to Saturday’s night game at Schalke. It was a good week because we analysed the Braunschweig game properly and I believe we’ve learnt our lessons ahead of Saturday night and the remainder of the season.

“Our focus now is solely on the future.”

…the match at Schalke: Any game at Schalke on a Saturday night in front of more than 60,000 fans is a massive one. Judging them as best I can from afar, Schalke definitely didn’t achieve what they wanted to in the first half of the season. They are a lot more solid now though and have a team full of really good players. A player like Karaman can make the difference in any game in this league with his movement and threat in the final third. The same applies to guys like Sylla and Seguin as well. We want to put in a really strong performance on Saturday and we’ve put in a lot of hard work during the week to be able to do so. We are also well aware that we will need to play extremely well if we want to get anything from the game.

...the mindset for the final few weeks of the season: We have got ourselves in a really promising position. We’ve worked hard to get here and will continue to do so. We won’t relax or start dreaming but will just focus on our own performances, which is enough work for us. We believe this approach will lead us to success. I’ve stated on several occasions that we don’t tend to think about the past but have just learnt from it. Our focus now is solely on the future. We’re hungry for success and are excited for Saturday night’s game. We’re not thinking about our final five games right now, just the one at Schalke. We can’t just snap our fingers and create resilience – it’s a continuous process that Loic and I have been working on with the team since we took over. We’re not here to defend anything; we want to go full throttle on attack and aggression. That mindset is something we’ve developed with the team from day one. We want to stand for courage and conviction. There have been setbacks along the way, of course, but we’ve always managed to shake them off. So we’re strong not just physically, but mentally too.