“Everything went against us today”

Miro Muheim: We weren’t sharp enough in the first half and we weren’t good enough either — that much is clear, especially as we effectively gifted them the opener. After the break we came out well, then conceded the second, but we kept going and really grew into the game. Then came two disallowed goals and two red cards. Whether you have to book someone in a situation like that, I don’t know. I don’t really want to say anything more about it. The fact is, it’s incredibly hard to accept and it feels really bad, because we could definitely have taken something today.

Nicolai Remberg: Fabio Vieira says he simply pointed out the goalkeeper’s time-wasting to the referee, and for me that’s nowhere near enough for a yellow card. That sending-off really took the wind out of our sails, even though we still didn’t give up afterwards. That’s our mentality but today it didn’t get rewarded because everything came together against us and it was a hugely disappointing afternoon. Overall though, we need to be honest and say that we deserved to lose, mainly because of the first half.

"We paid the price today" Merlin Polzin

Stefan Kuntz: We’re not going to lose focus, but we do have to address the small things we’re still not doing well enough. Nice performances only get you so far — ultimately we need points, and we haven’t taken any from our last three games. The way today played out is extremely hard to take. I don’t agree with the two second yellows, and I also don’t really understand why VAR disallowed our first goal. In my opinion, it should have stood. In the end, we’re left empty-handed, and that’s the reality we need to face.

Merlin Polzin: We certainly didn’t have a good first half and we made that very clear at half-time. We then started the second half well but conceded a very good free-kick for 2-0, which obviously made it significantly tougher. And yet we still saw a HSV side that kept going and we managed to get ourselves back into it, but then the game was decided by one or two external factors. What remains for us is this: we paid the price today, we need to learn from it and do things much better next week.

Lukas Kwasniok: The flow of the game was completely in our favour today. We deserved to lead at half-time, and after the break the free-kick goal really put us in control. But then the psychology of the game shifted. As Merlin said, the external factors were on our side today. Two disallowed goals, two red cards — what HSV still produced with nine men was impressive. But of course, the space opened up for us as a result and we took our chances to make it 3-1 and 4-1.