Alexander Nübel: We were very compact at the back

David Wagner:

It was a hard-fought 0-0 and we had a few good moments on the break. The way we won back possession and set Benito Raman in for his chance was great, but he unfortunately didn’t connect properly with the ball. That was probably our best chance. Borussia came closer to scoring in the second half, but we defended really well tonight. That pleased me a lot, so I think we deserved a point to start the new season.

Our performance was nowhere near being perfect though, especially with regard to our ball retention. Defensively we were good, but we need to do more going forwards. We have to carry on training hard and working hard. It also has to be mentioned that we came here with a very small squad. We were missing a large number of players due to injuries today. A lot of quality will return for us in the coming days and weeks.

Marco Rose:

Obviously we would have liked to have won. Despite that, I think our fans recognised our side’s performance today. I thought it was okay personally. We have taken a step forwards, by winning a lot of tackles and staying compact at the back. They only had one big chance before the break through Benito Raman and then had next to none in the second half. I think I’ll be able to show my lads plenty of good things when we go back and analyse the game. We need time to perfect a few things, such as the tempo we play at when we have the ball.

Alexander Nübel:

It’s never easy to play in BORUSSIA-Park. Our results from the last few years show that. As a result, I think we can happy with a draw today. Overall, I think it was a good display from us. We could have gone 1-0 up with a little bit of luck. I barely had anything to do in the first half, and only made two or three saves after the interval. On the whole, we were very compact at the back. We trained very intensively during pre-season and I think you could see that today. We also have free heads now, which was perhaps our problem last season.

Daniel Caligiuri:

We can be pleased with a draw at Gladbach on matchday 1 – not everyone is capable of that. We knew that today’s game would have a lot of tackles and we accepted that. I think you could see that we are growing as a footballing side now too. We could have gone ahead if we’d been a bit luckier. I can’t deny that we could have made of our chances on the break, I had a good chance myself too. I thought about shooting directly in the 79th minute, but I realised that would have been too difficult so I cut back onto my left, which unfortunately didn’t work out. I’m pleased with our performance on the whole. We can be pleased with the clean sheet too. Now we can all look forward to next weekend’s home game against FC Bayern.