On May 30th, 2015, the Wolves celebrated their greatest ever DFB-Cup triumph in Berlin. The next chance for the Green-Whites to work towards experiencing such amazing success will present itself on Wednesday, February 7th (kick-off 20:45 CET), when the Green-Whites take on FC Schalke 04 in the Veltins-Arena, with a cup semi-final place up for grabs. The Bundesliga clash away to Schalke, who are currently fifth in the league table, ended in a 1-1 draw, thanks to a last-minutes strike from Divock Origi. At the press conference on Tuesday, VfL head-coach Martin Schmidt spoke about …
… cup opponents Schalke: Particularly notable is their strength from set-pieces, above all the threat posed by Naldo. He can completely change the character of a game, as they can score from out of nowhere and take the lead. Schalke will want to control the game in their own ground, so we can then display our strengths coming from a solid, orderly set-up. During the Bundesliga game against them, we got to see that we certainly weren’t without a chance at Schalke. We played very well there and scored a deserved late equaliser at the end of a dominant second-half display. The self-belief earned from that display is something we can take into this match. All that counts tomorrow is a win – it’s all or nothing. We are making the trip to Schalke to win.
…Personnel: With such a packed schedule of fixtures, we will certainly rotate things in the more physically intensive positions. We want to maintain our structure, but the odd player will get his chance in the starting eleven this week. Riechedly Bazoer will miss out on the game through illness. Ignacio Camacho in increasing the intensity both in endurance and on the ball from day-to-day. John Anthony Brooks and Felix Uduokhai are both still in rehabilitation-training, where they will remain until at least Friday. Jakub Blaszczykowski’s back problems are regressing. We hope to have him back in full team training again soon.
…Motivation from the cup win in 2015: I wasn’t here at the time, but there will be players involved tomorrow who experienced the cup victory. We go past the celebratory picture from the final every single day. During the course of this week, we have of course looked at it quite differently. The route to experiencing that again must not be that far off, but we will need a top-performance and a vehement approach to the game. Playing away in the role of challenger is a particular highlight for every player.
First Team
