Three days remain until the start of a new competitive season, and many fans are now talking about the end of preseason. But Clemens Fritz, head of scouting and professional football at SV Werder Bremen, sees the current situation a little differently. “There is a match this week, so we are fully focused on competing. For us, preseason is already over.” Werder will start the season with a DFB-Pokal match against Carl Zeiss Jena on Saturday (19:45 CEST).
The former club captain returned to the pitch to observe training on Wednesday morning. “The team is looking really good,” said Fritz. “They are fit and there is great competition for places, which all of the lads are throwing themselves into. We will be even stronger by the time we travel to Jena, as all of our international players will have returned by Friday.” Since returning from international duty, Ludwig Augustinsson, Marco Friedl and Romano Schmid have been training individually. The same applies for Oscar Schönfelder and Milot Rashica, who picked up injuries whilst representing their countries. “Milot did some work in the weights room today,” said Fritz. “It wouldn’t make sense for him to play on Saturday unless he is 100% fit.” Aside from these few players, head coach Florian Kohfeldt has a full squad to choose from. Davy Klaassen, Ömer Toprak and Milos Veljkovic are all back in training.
Despite Werder’s positive preseason, Fritz isn’t placing too much value on what he has seen. “We shouldn’t make the mistake of reading into friendly results too much,” he warns. “We can take confidence from the number of goals we scored and how many clean sheets we kept, but we have to brace ourselves to go hard on Saturday. It’s especially important that we are quick into challenges – that will be decisive in the cup.”
