"We want to be more consistent"

The Rothosen are currently busy preparing for their final game of the year on Saturday against SpVgg Greuther Fürth. Head coach Merlin Polzin spoke at the start of the week about the team needing to gather power and energy ahead of their upcoming game. HSV are seeking to end the year on a high at the Volksparkstadion and to get back to winning ways after being held to a 1-1 draw in Ulm last weekend. Captain Sebastian Schonlau previewed the final game of the year while speaking to the media at a HSV charity event. Here's what the centre-back had to say about…

…the season so far: Overall, we're not satisfied with the number of points we've collected in the first half of the season. We also know that our performance in the first half in Ulm wasn't satisfactory either. It's something that's eating at us still. It can't be our reality that we only have 25 points at this stage. At the same time, the league is very evenly-matched this season, so even though we don't have as many points when compared to this stage of last season, we are still only three points off first place. That shouldn't be forgotten and we should keep that in the back of our minds, despite all of us also knowing that the 25 points we have collected so far just isn't enough. 

…room for improvement on the pitch: We haven't been able to play with consistency so far. That was once again the case last weekend. We managed to play our game for 45 minutes after the break, but we didn't manage to do right from the start. It was a similar story in Braunschweig. In the end, that results in us either drawing or losing the game. There's a lot of potential in this team, but the key thing is what we manage to bring to the pitch every weekend. If we don't manage to do that, then it's all just hypothetical potential. At the minute, we definitely have some players that aren't playing to their full potential yet. We have to be able to do that if we want to be able to influence the results of our games. 

"We want to manage to do the same thing again, by getting the fans behind us with a strong team performance."

…looking back on 2024 and ending the year against Greuther Fürth: It was a year of highs and lows. We kept experiencing moments and games in which we put together a string of good games and successes. At the same time, there were also setbacks in the second half of last season, as well as in the current season. There were too many ups and downs, but it's something we always make sure to address. We want to be more consistent. There's still one game left this year after all, against Fürth. We really want to keep all three points here in order to end the year on a high.  In order to do that, we want to play with a lot of energy, just like we did against Darmstadt recently where the fans were also 100% behind us. We want to manage to do the same thing again, by getting the fans behind us with a strong team performance.