Foals hoping to make the most of the international break

Borussia were without their seven internationals as a new training week began in Mönchengladbach on Wednesday. Breel Embolo is back on board with the team, while Joe Scally sat out some of today’s session.

The international break comes at the right time for the Foals off the back of the defeats to Bayern Leverkusen and Union Berlin. “Having a bit more time than normal to help get these games off our mind isn’t exactly a bad thing,” said Adi Hütter. However, this period also sees the boss lose international players Jonas Hofmann, Florian Neuhaus (both Germany), Yann Sommer, Nico Elvedi, Denis Zakaria (all Switzerland), Ramy Bensebaini (Algeria) and Conor Noß (Ireland U21s) from training, while the likes of Matthias Ginter (coronavirus), Marcus Thuram (MCL tear), Stefan Lainer (broken ankle), Manu Koné (knee) and Mamadou Doucouré (Achilles) are also still sidelined due to injury.

Working on changeovers and holding individual talks

It’s a pity that we’re missing so many players. It would have been good to use this time to work on fine tuning some things with the whole team,” said Hütter. As he doesn’t have the numbers to work on tactical elements as a team, the focus in training this week will be about practising changeovers in possession. “We will use this time to do lots of communicating with each other,” added Hütter.

Embolo to be eased into team training

After two days with the Switzerland national team, Breel Embolo is already back in Mönchengladbach and was already on the pitch with his teammates on Wednesday morning. “We want to ease Breel back into team training. In order to do that, we will need more sessions like today, in which he is able to get a feel for how to move and where he’s also able to contest some challenges,” said Hütter. Joe Scally, meanwhile, sat out today’s session after picking up a knock against Union. “Joe had played the full 90 minutes in each of our previous four games,” said Hütter. “As a young player, he’s not used to having a heavy workload such as this, which is why we were already planning on giving him a bit of a break this week.”