Hunt: "Made up for my mistake"
Bremen - Scorer of his side's first goal and puller of strings in the middle of the park, Aaron Hunt put in a match-winning performance as Werder Bremen dispatched Hamburger SV in the first northern derby of the season.
Werder made hard work of the win at times and Hunt himself missed a penalty before converting from the spot in the second half. After the match, the 25-year-old spoke to bundesliga.com about holding his nerve, the Rafael van der Vaart effect at Hamburg and the international break.
bundesliga.com: Aaron Hunt, are derby wins the most satisfying of all?
Hunt: After the defeat in Dortmund and losing in the cup, we just wanted to get our season started and thankfully we managed that. The victory over HSV was totally deserved and we could have scored a few more goals in the game. That's perhaps the only negative point - that we didn't convert the chances we created. The important thing was to get three points, however, and the fact that it was a derby makes it all the sweeter, of course.
bundesliga.com: What was going through your head when you stepped up to take the second penalty?
Hunt: I obviously wanted to make up for my mistake and hit this one better than I hit the first one. I'm pleased that my goal contributed to the team winning. We put a lot into this game, and considering the chances we had, it would have been a huge shame if we'd lost it.
bundesliga.com: Eljero Elia and Marko Arnautovic also wanted to take the second spot-kick.
Hunt:(laughs) Marko or Eljero weren't going to take it... Naturally you feel a bit unsure of yourself after missing a penalty, but there were a lot of words of support from my teammates and it was clear quite quickly that I would step up.
bundesliga.com: There was a lot of talk before the game about the Rafel van der Vaart effect. Did you prepare for that at all?
Hunt: It didn't really matter to us who was in the Hamburg team. Whether they played van der Vaart or a whole team of new signings, we just knew that we had to build on our performance in Dortmund - and we managed to do that, even if we did make things difficult for ourselves in the first half.
bundesliga.com: Does the international break now come at a bad time for Bremen?
Hunt: We can't do anything about it. The important thing is that we go into this break on the back of a victory. If we'd lost this game, the next two weeks wouldn't have been very enjoyable, but now we can send our international players away with a win under our belts, and that's good.
Michael Reis reporting from Bremen.
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