Mainz 05: Match reaction

Julian Nagelsmann: It was certainly a great game from a neutral perspective, but it definitely wasn’t for me or Martin Schmidt. At the end of the day we’re still delighted with the point. It was difficult at half-time but towards the end we could have even won the match. We had a lot of opportunities. We have to keep better control until the end of the match because then we could have scored more.

Martin Schmidt: We played their first hour of the match exactly as we planned to - with passion and blood, sweat and tears. Hoffenheim had a lot of good chances as they managed to slide the ball in behind us but someone always threw themselves in the way to close the gap. We counter-attacked well. I think we showed what we are capable of. We were a bit lucky as we managed to score four goals from five chances. Maybe we got complacent going in 4-1 up at the break. We conceded a couple of unnecessary goals at the end. When we analyse the match together, I will mainly talk about the first 60 minutes with the players. Hoffenheim had nothing to lose and put on a lot of pressure. After they scored the equaliser, they had something to play for and were the better team.

Oliver Baumann: It was a game of two halves. I think that the first half was a disaster for us. We didn’t defend as a team and we made a lot of mistakes, myself included. Mainz deserved to be in the lead but we gave it to them too easily. But then we believed in ourselves again and said that we would push on. We scored good goals one after the other.

Adam Szalai: At half-time I said to the boys that I’d played in a match like this before. I was playing at Mainz when we were 3-0 down to Wolfsburg but ended up winning the match 4-3. Anything is possible in football. Today we fought hard to get a 4-4 draw.

Mark Uth: During the week I had muscle problems so I sat out. I would have liked to be able to help the team more. We didn’t get into our stride today, we lost every challenge. We were too attacking and neglected our defensive duties. So we ended up going down by a lot of goals. At half-time, the manager reacted very loudly. We didn’t want to sit back in the second half and we kept going forward. We had nothing to lose.

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