Walter: “Every game writes its own stories”

The Rothosen are the visitors at Hertha BSC on matchday 20 in the 2. Bundesliga on Saturday evening. The game at the Olympiastadion is set to kick-off at 20:30 CET and will consequently be contested under the floodlights. Saturday’s game will be the third meeting between the two sides this season following the Rothosen’s 3-0 win in the return fixture in the middle of September and the spectacular DFB-Pokal round of 16 clash (Hertha won 5-3 on penalties following a 3-3 draw) at the start of December. HSV head coach Tim Walter discussed a number of different matters in his press conference this afternoon. 

The 48-year-old spoke in detail about…

...the squad situation: A couple of players are struggling with minor infections, so we need to make sure that they don’t do too much. That was the reason why Robert Glatzel did a reduced training session today. Additionally, Tom Mickel and William Mikelbrencis are fully involved in training again, as is Immanuel Pherai, who was dealing with some health issues going into the last game. Masaya Okugawa was also able to train again today. Everyone is available to play apart from our captain Sebastian Schonlau, who has also been making really good progress.  

...new signing Noah Katterbach: It’s just great that Noah’s back here. You can tell that he’s very happy to be back in a familiar environment. He was a great asset for us before his injury. Nevertheless, we need to be careful because a player can either get into the flow of things or fall into a hole following a cruciate ligament injury. It’s our job to get him back up to speed. He’ll certainly strengthen our squad in the long term.

...processing the KSC defeat: It was a very unnecessary loss because things that we thought we had sorted out reappeared again. We won the majority of our individual duels, but we lost the crucial individual duels. That was equally irritating for us and the spectators. Nevertheless, we processed the defeat quickly because we know where the problems lie. We need to continue working on these things and cut out our mistakes for good, or at least reduce the number of mistakes we’re making as errors are something that always happen in football. 

“I know that my lads are good enough to produce that on the pitch every game.”    

...his expectations of the game: Hertha are one of the teams that got relegated from the Bundesliga, were amongst the favourites for promotion at the start of the season and are sitting in 10th place at the moment. They have qualities that always make them capable of winning games. We learned that the hard way in the DFB-Pokal. Nonetheless, it’s our job to demonstrate our ability on the pitch and to be more consistent out of possession. If we defend as well as we did against Schalke and attack with the same verve that we did against Karlsruhe, then things will be looking good. That’s our aim. I know that my lads are good enough to produce that on the pitch every game.

...Hertha’s cup game yesterday: Every game needs to be looked at separately. That’s the beauty of football: No two games are the same. Every game writes its own stories. We saw Hertha’s cup game against Kaiserslautern yesterday and will factor it into our analysis. However, it would be wrong to expect a similar game at the weekend.