Despite leading at half time, SV Werder Bremen could not see out the win in their first friendly of pre-season, the final score being 3-1 to VfB Oldenburg. Head coach Ole Werner played all three of his summer signings so far in the game, as well as the returning Benjamin Goller, who fired home a deflected opener for the Green-Whites.
WERDER.DE has all the post-match reaction from the sidelines.
Ole Werner: “Of course we aren’t happy – we imagined this first friendly going differently. With four days of training under our belts though, it’s clear that we still need to get back into our routines, especially as the team’s a little bit cobbled together. Nevertheless, you need to take a game like this more seriously. Following an opening period where we had some difficulties, we grew into the game, did things properly and took the lead.
Following the break, we also looked to be in good working order, and had some good tempo on the ball, but at the end of the day made three silly mistakes to concede three goals. We needed to play more seriously, even if the legs might have felt a bit heavier after the last few days. We need to get back into our routines and speak with each other, because we just didn’t get going in the second half, which meant we lost 3-1.”
Clemens Fritz: “We did some good stuff on the ball in the first half, and I think the main thing that was missing in the second 45 was our shots on goal. Despite that, though, we were too sloppy on the ball after half time, we gave Oldenburg too many chances. That’s something we don’t want to see. If I know Ole, and I do, he’ll discuss things clearly and analyse the things which went wrong very thoroughly. We’ve still only been on the pitch for a couple of days, and we can put this result down to some certain things.
Even still, you have to say that we always want to win, and want to put the things we work on in training onto the pitch, and in those respects we were too slapdash in one or two situations. We can’t let that happen. We had a bit of a lack of coordination, which you could definitely see with their equaliser. There is definitely still a bit of tiredness in certain players’ legs following the last couple of days, but we can definitely do better and that should be our target.”
Amos Pieper: “There were quite a few positives in my first game for Werder, but at the end of the day we lost, and you can’t be happy with that. The result is no less important just because it’s a friendly. Things are still okay though, because we can discuss things among each other now and make things clear on what we have to change. We’ll start that in our next training session and then put the game behind us. We created some good chances in the game, played on the front foot and had a lot of bravery in our build-up play – I’m looking forward to playing like that.”
