“We’ve taken an important step”

The Wolves secured their first league victory under Bruno Labbadia on Saturday, beating SC Freiburg 2-0. The win at the Schwarzwald-Stadion, which the VfL boss described as “immensely important”, drags the Black Forest outfit back into the relegation battle. Freiburg coach Christian Streich had been hoping for some “special moments” against the Wolves, but two goals from Daniel Didavi earned the visitors a precious three points.

Bruno Labbadia: Clearly that was an immensely important win for us – especially considering the fact that we had failed to reward ourselves in recent games. The fact that a defeat for Freiburg would plunge a direct opponent into danger is something I made clear to the players. There are very few clubs as likeable as Freiburg but, as sorry as I am for them, [a win] against another team in the relegation battle is exactly what we needed. Today’s win is very, very significant. We’ve taken an important step – but no more than that. I hope we can carry this success into our next few games.

Christian Streich: We failed to stop Didavi, who has a strong left foot, and it was 1-0 after just two minutes. Everyone knows that we’re not going to win games 4-3 in our current predicament, because we’re just not capable of creating goalscoring chances at the moment. Their opener caused a few minutes of unease, but we did reasonably well after that until we got to the final third. Then we needed those special moments, but unfortunately for us Wolfsburg had two of them. We’ve done so well lately and the players have gone above and beyond the call of duty, but we really need to experience that winning feeling again. Taking the lead always helps but we didn’t manage to do that today, which is why Wolfsburg got the win they deserved.