FC St. Pauli

Head coach Timo Schultz: “It’s hard for me to sum up. A few days ago we had a game where we struggled to come up with any answers and I was happy to settle for a point. Today I’m angry and proud of my team at the same time. We started superbly and caused KSC a number pf problems. After 20 minutes, it’s 2-0, but not to us. But I’m proud of the way we hit back and gave it all we had and found footballing solutions on the pitch and created chances and took them. So I’m only partially satisfied with point. We’ll take it. Even though it’s only one point, it does us good in the table.”

Johannes Eggestein: “For me personally, it was very positive to have scored after such a long time, and not just once but twice. The assist will give me confidence as well. I have a good understanding with Lukas Daschner. We combine and harmonise well. I keep working hard on my game. For us as a team, it was a crazy ride. On the one hand, we’re angry because we conceded too easily, especially the one in the second half because it meant we were behind again right away. On the other, the way we kept coming back here at Karlsruhe is positive and an excellent performance.”

Lukas Daschner: “First and foremost, we’ll take the point because every point is important at the moment. We’d have liked all three, of course, but it wasn’t to be. We have the mentality. We’ve proved that often enough. We can hold our own as a team and we’ve no need to worry. There was never any doubt about that. We can take that with us into the second half of the season. Scoring four away from home was important. Not many teams do that. It could have been even more when I look back at the first half. We can build on that.”

Marcel Hartel: “We can take quite a lot from the game, especially the mentality we showed. We never lost hope of coming back into it. What we take from the game is that we didn’t give up after the setbacks. We had the chances to win it if we hadn’t given the goals away so easily. Karlsruhe were able to break quickly and we fell asleep form a throw-in for their third goal. That shouldn’t happen because you get punished straightaway. We had the courage to play football. In general, we have to keep our belief that we can win games. I’m obviously disappointed with the season so far. We wanted to do better than where we are now. Now we have to clear our minds during the winter break and then prepare for the second half of the season with total focus.”

Christian Eichner (KSC head coach): “Today I saw a team who were much better than us, who attacked our goal from the outset and who had high-quality footballing solutions. You could see the situation we’re in in the opening stages. We weren’t brave enough but suddenly found ourselves two up. I haven’t experienced anything as extreme as that in recent weeks but it’s often been the case that we’ve found ourselves 2-0 down despite playing well. It was different today, but that didn’t put us in a frame of mind where we can kill our opponents off, even after we went 3-1 up, which I thought would calm things down. Instead, it carried on as before. We switched things round a little during the interval, but it stayed like the first half. We scored first and then conceded far too easily. It was a crazy Saturday. It’s an important point for both teams. We have a lot of homework to do.”

Photos: Witters