FC St. Pauli

Over a cup of East Frisian tea, Schulle spoke about...

...the personnel situation: "Marvin Senger and Luis Coordes are ruled out along with Christopher Buchtmann and Ryo Miyaichi, otherwise everyone is fit. Leart Paqarada came back from international duty unscathed. If you take the flights and the games together, he had a very heavy workload. He trained in full yesterday and will do so again today. One or two players will hook up with the Under-23s. We'll decide who after we've removed the final question marks."

...Guido Burgstaller: "He'd only completed one-and-a-half sessions with the team before the Sandhausen game, so there could be no talk of him being integrated. He's been fully involved over the last 14 days, however, and we've been able to discuss everything with him – how we see his position and his role on the pitch on and off the ball. We've taken at least one step forward during the international break. Guido is top fit, he just lacks that last bit of match practice. You can only get the last five to ten per cent by playing, not in training."

...training during the international break: "We've been working on pressing the ball constantly so as to put the opposition under pressure sooner. We don't want to allow our opponents too much time in which to build up play unhurriedly. That's the biggest point we've been able to develop. We've also worked on our attacking patterns. In view of the late signings of Simon and Guido, we've carried on practising, fine-tuning and looking at which is the best system. We're still in a process but are definitely a step further than we were before the international break."

...the lack of consistency over 90 minutes thus far: "The phases we've done well in are the ones where we kept to our plan. When something happens to knock us out of our stride, we've often struggled to find the appropriate answer straightaway. That's OK, though, because it's a process of development. We're still not in a position to play with a degree of consistency over 90 minutes. We have to invest and be ready to take on every tackle and every metre."

...Nürnberg's style of play: "They're a very good, compact side who defend aggressively from the front and whose strengths lie in their quick transitional play with lots of pacy, agile players."

...a game between two evenly matched teams: "I would argue that 95% of the games in the second division are evenly matched. You always have the odd disastrous or outstanding day when you win or lose a game comfortably. I go into every game knowing it can go either way but also certain we can win it."

...the 1,000 fans at the Millerntor: "We had just over 2,000 fans against Heidenheim and now it's only 1,000. It doesn't make much difference. I'm just glad to have someone in the ground at all. Given the [infection] numbers in recent days, we can be glad to have 1,000 fans. I hope we don't have to take another step back with the result that no one's in the ground."

Photos: Witters