‘Everyone’s raring to go and making my decisions very difficult’

Hamburger SV face their next Bundesliga challenge on Saturday (live on HSVnetradio from 3.15 pm), travelling away to newly promoted SC Paderborn for Matchday 7. Having won their last three matches in a row, HSV head to the East Westphalia region full of confidence, while remaining well aware of the difficulty of the task ahead, as Merlin Polzin explained at Thursday’s press conference. The 35-year-old spoke in detail about …

… team news: We have two definite absentees for the weekend: Nicolai Remberg and Mario Vuskovic, for the well-known reasons. Otherwise, there is plenty of positive news: Patson Daka, Albert Sambi Lokonga and Bakery Jatta have taken a full part in much of training and will therefore be available again for the weekend. We’ve had an intensive week of training, with yesterday’s workload significantly higher than today’s. There are always one or two minor knocks and niggles. For example, we kept Nicolas Capaldo indoors today to manage his workload and avoid taking any risks with the match just two days away. The same applies to Jordan Torunarigha, who felt something today, so we took him out of training.

… the opposition: We’re looking forward to seeing assistant coach Pit Reimers again. He did a fantastic job here at HSV for a long time and knows the club inside out. As they have done in recent weeks, SC Paderborn will prepare thoroughly for their opponents and have plenty of solutions ready. Our job is to avoid playing into the situations they have prepared for and to stick to our own game. We need to remain extremely aggressive and sharp, particularly in those transitional moments. We managed that both at Hoffenheim and against Stuttgart. Everyone on the pitch knew exactly what was required of us in terms of our approach. We can’t simply head into this match and play as though it were any other match. We have a lot of new players who have never played at Paderborn before. Every game is different. We need to understand exactly what it takes to be successful in Paderborn, without going into too much detail here. Horst (Hrubesch, ed.) reminded me the other day of what matters in Paderborn. Naturally, we’ll also take his advice on board to give ourselves the best possible chance of success there.

… competition for places and the impact of substitutes: We’re in an outstanding position at the moment. We have a lot of lads who are performing well and helping the team to be successful. That’s a fantastic situation for me as a coach and for us as a team. The competition for places has an effect on the team. It means you have to train better, with greater intensity and focus, to earn your playing time. At the same time, we have real confidence that our finishers can influence games in the closing stages, as we’ve seen recently at Hoffenheim and against Stuttgart. It’s incredibly valuable to have reached a point where the opposition know that HSV can step things up towards the end of a match and turn games in our favour. That gives us a very special feeling: everyone believes that the lads coming off the bench will see the game through and get the job done. Everyone’s raring to go and making it very difficult for me to decide who will start.

… the current situation: After our first three games, it was really important to me that we didn’t lose our heads or let our nerves get the better of us. We remained completely clear about our objectives and our approach. We’re doing exactly the same now, following our three wins and the friendly victory against Copenhagen. We approached the week as normal, reviewed the match on video in the usual way and discussed the aspects that helped us win. That’s important if we’re to keep strengthening our playing philosophy. At the same time, we highlighted things we weren’t entirely happy with. These are recurring issues relating to our team and group tactics, as well as position-specific details.

… the midfield and Bilal Nadir: We won’t be able to replace Rambo, because he’s a very special player and personality. Things will be different now. Everyone in the stadium and watching on television could see why we chose Bilal against Stuttgart. He’s a player with tremendous technical quality on the ball, but he also has that hunger to chase opponents down and make his presence felt in duels. That’s something we’ve already liked about him over the past few months. Of course, there are also areas he needs to keep working on, and we’ll support him in that. The same goes for the other lads in our midfield. We have great quality in that position, and each player has his own way of playing football. We need to figure out which player profiles complement one another best. That’s a great challenge.