“A lot was missing”

Today didn’t go to plan. This, the final home game of the 2021/22 Bundesliga season, was one Herthaner everywhere hoped would be filled with celebration and relief, as the club remained in the Bundesliga for another season. In reality, the 2-1 defeat to 1. FSV Mainz 05 meant the wait for survival went on. The Blue-Whites then had to find words to sum up the loss in front of the microphones and explain why the defeat came about today, following three matches unbeaten. “I’m not doing well at the moment. We hoped to finish the job here at the Olympiastadion today and celebrate with the fans, but sadly that hasn’t happened,” said a dejected Marcel Lotka. Prince Boateng was more self-critical: “We simply weren’t in the game from minute one to minute 94 – we weren’t in the right mindset. A lot was missing from what we have shown in recent weeks: the energy, the calmness and cleverness on the ball,” said our number 27. All the reaction from the defeat is here on herthabsc.com.

Marcel Lotka: I’m not doing well at the moment. We hoped to finish the job here at the Olympiastadion today and celebrate with the fans, but sadly that hasn’t happened. We discussed going over to the fans in the Ostkurve before the game – it was the right time to do it and the fans got behind us fantastically. Their first goal was a careless mistake from me. I can’t allow that to happen again. I tried to catch the ball and somehow it went through me. We planned to focus on ourselves and win our game, but now we’re relying on FC Bayern to win on Sunday for us to stay in the Bundesliga.

Prince Boateng

We simply weren’t in the game from minute one to minute 94 – we weren’t in the right mindset. A lot was missing from what we have shown in recent weeks: the energy, the calmness and cleverness on the ball. That can happen from time to time, though. It’s a shame to lose at home in front of a crowd like this. The fans really got behind us today – we tried to get them behind us before the game and they really pushed us on. I’m sure it wasn’t easy for them, because we’ve played so poorly. We gave everything we had in each of our last games, which meant we kept all the possibilities on the table and survival in our own hands. We still believe we can stay up – we’ve worked so hard for it in the last few weeks. That shows the team is alive and the spirit is there. Of course, I’ll be interested in how the Bayern-Stuttgart game goes, but I’d rather have finished the job ourselves. I hope the game goes well for us tomorrow.

Davie Selke: I have to be honest, the thing I did (to score a disallowed injury-time equaliser) wasn’t a foul. If you give those kinds of decisions to defenders, then strikers won’t be able to score headers anymore. If the referee went to the monitor and looked at it, he would have given the goal. Anyway, we shouldn’t talk about refereeing performances; we just didn’t hit the mark in terms of our performances over the last few weeks, which meat we lost against a very good Mainz team. We had the chance to finish the job, but we haven’t taken it and how we’ll have to watch the match on TV tomorrow. We discussed going to the fans before the game amongst ourselves, and I think it was a good idea, even if we have to start doing these things for positive reasons at some point.