Domenico Tedesco: Full credit to the team

Domenico Tedesco:

First of all, I wish Lars Stindl a speedy recovery and hope he can be back out playing again soon.

It would have been a tough game 11 vs 11. It felt like we played with 10 for the full game and that’s not easy against a team like Gladbach but the manner in which we performed given the circumstances was exceptional.

With 10 men, we played with Yevhen Konoplyanka and Amine Harit both as number 8s. I thought they excelled there. It was important for the team and the players‘ development. We can be proud of our performance. A performance like that can actually have more worth than three points themselves. We learnt our lessons from recent weeks and were excellent mentally and tactically. At the end, we had the better, clearer chance and could have even won the game. The game will give us a boost.

I don’t want to use ‚violent conduct‘ to describe the incident with Nabil. There’s a bit of context to it. He was fouled then shoved and his hand hit his opponents‘ head – without intent though. In my eyes, a yellow card would have been sufficient. I’ll talk to Nabil about it. He knows his hand shouldn’t be up there and he’ll learn from it.

Dieter Hecking:

It was a Westderby full of emotion. It had everything. After the sending off, the game was transformed. We used our man advantage very well in the first half and made Schalke work without the ball. The team kept patience despite Schalke’s solid defending. In the second half, we tried too much too soon. We tried to get the ball forward too quickly. That allowed Schalke to cause problems on the counter and we can’t let that happen. The second half performance showed why Domenico Tedesco and S04 are so high up in the table.