After the training camp cancellation on Sunday, SV Werder Bremen continued their preparation at home in Osterdeich on Monday. Coach Ole Werner spoke about the impact of the trip being cancelled at short notice.
“Sunny training?”, it said in SV Werder Bremen’s tweet on Monday morning: “Goes also in Bremen.” Backed up by a video, including a wink smiley – just in case anyone had assumed that the sun would only show itself in Spain at this time of year. But the nine degrees in northern Germany meant somewhat different conditions than the 21 degrees in Murcia reported by the weather service. The second division club would actually have held its training camp there for around a week, but cancelled the trip on Sunday afternoon due to five positive corona results in the tests carried out beforehand.
Will Füllkrug and Co. be out?
“We would have liked to go to Spain,” coach Ole Werner said on Monday, but circumstances had not allowed it. “That’s why I think the decision was the right one.” More serious than Werner’s inability to travel with his team would be the loss of the four infected professionals. Niclas Füllkrug, Marco Friedl, Milos Veljkovic and Manuel Mbom tested positive on Sunday morning. The results of two further tests were not yet available by Monday afternoon. That’s how long the quartet, along with Mitchell Weiser, who had already come down with Corona, will have to comply with domestic quarantine regulations. “It is certainly very annoying that players we would have liked to work with are missing from the pitch,” said Werner.
Three players from Werder’s U 23 already trained on Wednesday: Tim van de Schepop, Lasse Rosenboom and Tim-Justin Dietrich. Jakob Löpping is also expected to join them. In Bremen, the club can at least react more flexibly to any further Corona cases by bringing in more young players. In Murcia, on the other hand, “we would have run the risk of training in a very small group,” explained the Werder coach. The tests on Monday delivered exclusively negative results for the remaining players. The club also announced the first of two planned test match opponents: on Wednesday, Werder will host third-division team Viktoria Berlin at 4 p.m., excluding spectators at Bremen’s training ground.
Training contents unchanged
According to Werner, the training content this week is the same as it would have been in Spain. It will be about switching phases, counter-pressing and behaviour after losing the ball – especially in the final third, where his team should create more chances. Defensively, the coach wants to promote even more consistent defending in and around the penalty area. In principle, however, no major changes are expected, for example in the basic tactical order.
There is, however, one thing the team lacks due to the cancelled trip to Spain: permanent proximity. “That’s a point,” Werner thinks, “in the training camp, where you spend 24 hours a day with each other, you get to know players and people even more intensively. That’s certainly the case.” On the other hand, there is still a lot of time together in Bremen, which offers some opportunities for in-depth discussions – perhaps not necessarily in large groups, but in individual exchanges. The 33-year-old simply wants to make the best of the current situation with all its restrictions, he said: “I don’t see the big drama there now.
