Lard Bender (r.) believes Leverkusen's Matchday 26 loss to Hoffenheim mirrored their overall form in 2014...
Lard Bender (r.) believes Leverkusen's Matchday 26 loss to Hoffenheim mirrored their overall form in 2014...

Bender: 'Story of our year'

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Leverkusen - Lars Bender believed Bayer 04 Leverkusen's 3-2 home defeat to 1899 Hoffenheim - their fifth defeat from their last six league matches - was the story of their years so far, while the visitor's Kevin Volland called the victory "revenge" for Hoffenheim's defeat in this fixture earlier in the season, which came courtesy of a phantom goal.

Bayer 04 Leverkusen

bundesliga.com rounds up the post-match reaction from the BayArena...

Lars Bender: The result is typical of how the year has gone for us, we're just not turning good performances into wins. It's really frustrating. We might have a bit of bad luck with an offside goal, but at the end of the day we can't make any excuses.

1899 Hoffenheim


Kevin Volland: We ground out the win. We sat deep and let them come at us and when we got our chances, we took them really well. We felt we had something to make good on after the home game [and the phantom goal scored by Stefan Kießling], and now we’ve got revenge. I’m really happy with the goal I scored; I haven’t had much luck in front of goal recently.

Sejad Salihovic: I’m happy my penalty went in and that it helped us win the game. We wanted a reaction to our last game [against Mainz] and we put in a really good shift, so credit to the team. Recently we’ve lost points after being in front, so I was nice that we stuck to or task and got our rewards today.

Anthony Modeste: I think it was a really important win because a lot of teams behind us in the table also won this week. We were really up for the game after what happened the last time we played Leverkusen and we gave the perfect response on the pitch.


Two 1899 Hoffenheim players made it into this week's Top 5 Goals of the Week on the official Bundesliga YouTube channel: