Michael Langer: We have to defend better as a team

Following the final whistle at the Mercedes-Benz Arena on Saturday afternoon (27/2), Christian Gross and VfB coach Pellegrino Matarazzo gave their thoughts on the game along with S04 goalkeeper Michael Langer.

Bundesliga

27.02.21, 18:46

Michael Langer

Christian Gross:

We chose to go for a mixture of zonal and man-marking to defend set pieces which didn’t work at all. When you’re in a certain space, you can still defend from these balls in. It’s a case of taking responsibility at set pieces but we simply didn’t do that. We tried to push forward in the second half and you could see that. It was very unfortunate that we weren’t able to the convert the penalty. That would have given us a big boost for the last 15 minutes. It’s a defeat that hurts because we felt that we were prepared going into the game. We just made too many individual mistakes.

Pellegrino Matarazzo:

We played very well in the first half, both in terms of how we attacked and how we defended. After that, we maybe took our foot off the gas a bit. We lost a bit of our compactness at the start of the second half and I wasn’t pleased about that. We made it unnecessarily tense for ourselves.

Michael Langer:

We just switched off in key situations in our own box in the first half, especially with set pieces. We have to defend better as a team. Everyone needs to be a part of that. It’s a case of assessing dangerous situations better. Despite going behind, we had opportunities to get back into the game and I thought we showed good fight after going 3-0 down. Gregor Kobel made some fantastic saves.

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