We heard from the players and coaches following Borussia’s 5-1 loss away to SV Werder Bremen on Saturday night.
Yann Sommer: We weren’t at the races for the first 15 minutes. We misplaced too many passes, were sloppy and didn’t get stuck in. We simply invited them to score goals against us. We know what their strengths are, however we didn’t manage to neutralise them in the first 15 minutes. It’s tough to find an explanation for this defeat. Werder were really clinical and took advantage of how passive we were. We lost the game early on. We were better in the second half and created a few chances, but weren’t efficient enough with them. This has obviously put a dampener on our good start to the season. We will thoroughly analyse this defeat and then move on.
Marvin Friedrich: We felt like we were well prepared for Bremen, but didn’t put any of our plans in practice during the opening phase of the match. Our tackling wasn’t good enough and we didn’t cover enough ground during the first 20 minutes. When that happens, things can go wrong quickly in the Bundesliga. It’s hard to explain why this all happened. We won’t let this defeat knock us off course. We played well over the first seven games, so we won’t start to question everything after one bad defeat. We will have to analyse this game and then improve for the derby next week against Köln.
Jonas Hofmann: We misplaced so many passes and lost so many challenges. I’m a bit stunned because we had been on it from the first minute in our last two away games, which simply wasn’t the case tonight. All criticism is justified right now. The coach spoke to us at the break about things we should improve on immediately and those were things we should have been doing anyway. We wanted to at least win the second half and played as a team then. We wanted to come back and try to score four or five goals. We ultimately lost the game today inside the first 15 minutes. Bremen deserved to win.
Daniel Farke: Things like this unfortunately happen sometimes in football. We weren’t good enough in the first 20 minutes and lost the game then due to our defending. We couldn’t make a single pass in the first few minutes and lost every challenge. The third goal was a perfect example of that. We didn’t change everything after going a few goals down because we didn’t want to completely confuse the lads. They showed a good reaction after that. We had several chances to get back into the game and then didn’t afford them too many opportunities. Overall though, we definitely deserved to lose the game.
Werder Bremen head coach Ole Werner: It was a brilliant first half by us, almost perfect. Our aggression without the ball was the key thing to our good start tonight. We created a number of chances from our ball recoveries and obviously via a bit of luck. That enabled us to decide the game early on. We were a bit more cautious in the second half. We were fortunate on a few occasions that Gladbach didn’t score, which would have got them back into the game. It was a great performance overall by my team and they can be really proud this evening.
