Christian Gross: We need to look ahead | OneFootball

Both head coaches spoke to the media after Schalke’s late defeat against 1. FC Köln on Monday (20/1). Omar Mascarell also gave his opinion on the game to the press.

It was an even first half, in which we had two good chances. Their goal came from a lack of tactical discipline on our part. We played more with aggression and went at them more in the second half. I had hoped that we would put more pressure on them during the first half. We have to work on our confidence in front of goal. We had chances to make it 2-1 and then conceded on the break, which is so disappointing. I saw many good attacking moments and a brave performance from my team. That is a positive despite the defeat. Now, we need to look ahead. We need to build the players’ confidence back up and hope for more cohesion. We win and lose together.

I was happy with our performance up until their equaliser. They caused us problems with their strong dribblers, Uth and Harit. We were then under pressure when it went 1-1. Thankfully, we made it 2-1. The changes were important so that we got some fresh legs on the pitch. Harit especially was tough to defend with his low centre of gravity. It’s a great win for us, there’s no doubt about that. It will do the team the world of good.

This really hurts. We didn’t deserve to lose this game. We had a lot of good chances to win the match, but we didn’t take them and, as you often do in football, we ended up losing a game like this. There’s nothing else we can do apart from carry on working hard and believing in ourselves. We’ve got so many games still to play and we’re the only people who can do something about our situation.