An important friendly against St. Truiden despite missing lots of players

Head coach Gerardo Seoane will select a team from a mixture of first-team players and U23s for Thursday’s friendly against Belgium top-tier side VV St. Truiden at the Foals’ training ground (13:00 CEST).

Jonathan Foss, Tony Reitz, Jacob Italiano, Ryan Naderi, Shio Fukuda and Mika Schroers are likely to make the step up from Borussia’s U23 side, since Jonas Omlin (shoulder operation), Nico Elvedi (recovering from a knee sprain), Christoph Kramer (MCL strain), Tony Jantschke (muscle problems), Julian Weigl (knee ligament strain), Florian Neuhaus (resting) and Jordan (illness) will be sidelined, along with the ten absentees on international duty.

Even though the only first-team players available for selection are Moritz Nicolas, Jan Olschowsky, Marvin Friedrich, Lukas Ullrich, Franck Honorat, Manu Koné, Hannes Wolf, Nathan Ngoumou, Robin Hack, Patrick Herrmann and Alassane Plea, playing a friendly makes a lot of sense in the eyes of head coach Gerardo Seoane: “You can’t replicate a match in training and that’s why the friendly is really important for those who are just getting back from injuries and those who haven’t got much game time recently. It’s also a good opportunity for the young players to get more minutes.”