“They were very intense days”

Sandro Schwarz gave a summary of what's been going on in Kienbaum since the beginning of the week. “Pre-season is supposed to hurt,” the new head coach told his players during Friday morning's session. Whether interval runs, weight room work or circuit training, the players had a tough workload to deal with. “They were very intense days, we did a total of ten sessions in six days of training. The first step was to train very intensively physically. We did that from the first day at the training ground and carried on in Kienbaum. We had great conditions for it,” said Schwarz, who was satisfied with the time spent during the training camp. The 43-year-old also got his team working on the ball. Evidence of the work should be visible once more, as Hertha take on SV Babelsberg 03 on Saturday (02/07/22, 16:00 CEST) following the 7-0 victory in the first friendly of pre-season against TuS Makkabi Berlin. “Our task is to perform despite tired legs, to not look for any excuses and to carry on improving our game. The goal has to be implementing intensity, counter-pressing and defending from the front in our game. Of course, it's also about winning,” Schwarz said, speaking to the media ahead of the second pre-season friendly. herthabsc.com has summarised the highlights. Our coach discussed...

Sandro Schwarz: They were very intense days, we did a total of ten sessions in six days of training, so that’s why it was such a tight programme. The first step was to train very intensively physically. We did that from the first day at the training ground and carried on in Kienbaum. We had great conditions for it. We also had a focus on working out of possession, but we also trained some of our principles and worked on our positional play, which was important. We are satisfied with how things are at the moment, but we know that we still have to improve in all areas in the coming weeks. The important thing is that we only work on the things that we want to see on the pitch. That's what we expect of the boys and that's what they do.

Sandro Schwarz: In terms of principles, we won't try anything different. In terms of the system, our aim is to keep developing it during our training sessions. There won’t be any major differences because you’re always making changes out on the pitch. Whether it’s a 4-4-2, a 4-2-3-1 or with a back three in defence, we’ll have to wait and see. It also depends on the availability of players.

Sandro Schwarz: We’ll wait and see what the medical examination reveals at the start of next week for Jessic Ngankam. We don't want to take any risks because we know his history with his cruciate ligament operation. We’re expecting Dongjun Lee to make a full return in England and Stevan Jovetić will do so on Monday. Then the national players will return; they’ll undergo performance tests and then we’ll build up their workload on a player-by-player basis. So they will be initially training completely different things to the boys who have already been here for two weeks. Then we'll see how the group develops. All of them are Hertha players and that's how they are treated. But it's clear that the group is too big at the moment and will still change.

Sandro Schwarz: Even during my first few days in Berlin it was great to see how the young players were integrating themselves. You can see that they have been trained really well in the youth setup, regardless of whether they’d been playing with the U19s or the U23s. The younger players will also be involved next week. Then we'll have to make a decision on how we’ll put the squad together to go to England so that we can work well there. It's about performance, but also about development and about what makes sense. Perhaps training with the youth team again so they can learn the way we’re doing things. We will discuss it all, but we’re not going to set a limit on the amount of players we take to the second training camp.

Sandro Schwarz: Our task is to perform despite tired legs, to not look for any excuses and to carry on improving our game. It will be a bigger challenge than against TuS Makkabi because Babelsberg are a fourth-division side. We want to play with intensity, press them and defend from the front. We obviously want to win the game too. We will play with two different teams again. Rune Jarstein and Oliver Christensen will play a half each.

Sandro Schwarz: The new president and new vice-president introduced themselves. We had a barbecue with them and the team. It was nice to get to know them like this before they really get down to business.