“Opponents at a different level” | OneFootball

Markus Krösche, Dino Toppmöller and Nathaniel Brown with the reaction to the 4-1 defeat at home to Leverkusen.

Board member for sport Markus Krösche: “You saw that we still have a lot of room for improvement. Bayer have unbelievable quality and the ability to decide a game like that in eight minutes. The last two defeats hurt. They were against opponents at a different level, we knew that beforehand. We’re simply not yet ready to compete against teams at this top level.”

Head coach Dino Toppmöller: “It’s a very deserved win for Leverkusen, and one we can learn a lot from. We’ve now been shown our limitations against the two best teams in Germany. We also need to allow for a bit of disappointment today, the result obviously hurts – we hoped for more than what we produced on the pitch. We’ll analyse that and then our complete focus turns to what’s ahead of us. We now need to stick closely together.”

Nathaniel Brown: “We’re very disappointed, we wanted to show we can do it against the big boys. Leverkusen have unbelievable quality. We’ll analyse it and draw our conclusions, then the focus is on Ajax. We can’t concede eight goals in two matches. I’m still young and haven’t come up against many opponents of [Jeremie] Frimpong’s quality. I can learn a lot from that. I got better after the opening period. You can’t stop everything against teams like these – we’ve played against the best two in the league one after the other.”