Markus Schubert: The lads gave me confidence

David Wagner:

We are obviously happy with the win. The first half was good, but we didn’t play at a high enough tempo. We wanted to step it up after the break and then we got the goal. We defended our lead cleverly after the sending off. The fans’ amazing support once again helped us. Everybody in the saw stadium saw that we are a proper team.

It was a mental day for us. Ahmed Kutucu got injured this morning, then Weston McKennie went off injured early on too. He has dislocated his shoulder and has already gone to hospital.

Alexander Nübel wasn’t trying to catch Mijat Gacinovic when he was sent off, but just arrived too late. It obviously looks really bad. The referee’s decision was definitely correct. Markus Schubert was great after coming on, as was Juan Miranda – who also celebrated his Bundesliga debut.

Adi Hütter:

Based on how much ground we covered tonight, I can’t fault the team for the result. Even after going a man down, Schalke were strong and defended well in a 4-4-1. Alexander Nübel misjudged the situation. It looked horrible from the sidelines, and he deserved to be shown a red card, but it wasn’t on purpose.

Markus Schubert:

Coming on as a substitute was obviously surprising. But the whole team and the coaching staff helped me feel good straight away. The boys gave me courage and told me to stay calm, which I did. I think we played well for being a man down and we also deserved to win. We dominated the game for almost the entire 90 minutes, had a lot of possession and scored a nice goal. We took advantage of Frankfurt’s mistake before the goal.

Daniel Caligiuri:

We pulled out all the stops today. The game was very difficult, especially after the red card. Despite being outnumbered, we were not passive, but tried to keep the game active. As a team, we managed to defend our goal, and we almost got another goal ourselves. For Alex, the red card came from a 50/50 challenge, which looked like it was already doomed to end badly from the first step. Immediately afterwards, you could see the horrible mistake. He certainly didn’t intend to hurt Gacinovic, and we all wish him a speedy recovery.