Lars Stindl was on target as Borussia Mönchengladbach dismantled SV Werder Bremen in the Matchday 20 opener. - © © gettyimages / Baron
Lars Stindl was on target as Borussia Mönchengladbach dismantled SV Werder Bremen in the Matchday 20 opener. - © © gettyimages / Baron

Mönchengladbach delight at dismantling Bremen

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Borussia Mönchengladbach were satisfied with a job well done after beating SV Werder Bremen 5-1 on Friday to kick off Matchday 20 in spectacular style.

Borussia Mönchengladbach 5-1 SV Werder Bremen

Goals: 1-0 Stindl (12’), 2-0 Christensen (32’), 3-0 Christensen (50’), 3-1 Pizarro (pen. 57’), 4-1 Raffael (pen. 70’), 5-1 Nordtveit (87')

Andreas Christensen (Gladbach defender): “It was good to get a goal. I’ve gone close in the last few games, but it was a good day for me. The most important thing was to get back to winning ways. You could see that we were ready from the very start. They’ve beaten us twice already this season, but we were hungry to get back to winning ways. I hope we can start a streak. In the first half of the season, we were playing every two or three days. Now we’ve got to wait a week, which makes it a little more difficult.”

Lars Stindl (Gladbach forward): “It's a great feeling to have got our first win of the year. We controlled the game for almost the full 90 minutes. We put in a very focused performance and obviously wanted to forget the unnecessary defeat in Mainz. We challenged ourselves to be more clinical in the final third, which we managed very well. We made the most of our attacking qualities and scored five goals as a result.”

Havard Nordtveit (Gladbach midfielder): “We’ve talked about the fact we haven’t managed to pick up three points in our first two games back, but it’s great to have got the win on home soil here today. [On his goal] I didn’t think about the shot, I just hit it. I think we took a lot of joy in our work today. When they pressed us high we did well to play our way out from the back. When Raffael scored from the spot it was game over.”

Andre Schubert (Gladbach coach): “Today we won the ball early. We were strong in our transitions and kept things tight at the back. We haven't let ourselves be driven crazy by how things have gone and have instead calmly adapted.”

Clemens Fritz (Bremen captain): “It’s a tough result. We did everything in our power to defend our goal, but we didn’t manage that today. There were too many easy balls that got through and we’ll need to work on that. We weren’t aggressive enough, we didn’t close our men down and that made life easy for Gladbach. These are things to do with concentration. We know that we’ll suffer setbacks, but now we need to concentrate on our next game. Of course today is a setback, but we need to shake it off. We don’t need to go over every goal. As I said, we were the cause of our own downfall. We know that we’ve got to show a lot more on the pitch.”

Viktor Skripnik (Bremen coach): “They scored too many goals today. We need to be more clinical in certain situations instead of gifting our opponents chances. Of course we came up against a very strong side. Their body language showed they were up for it from the very first minute. We’re taking things step by step and are moving forward, we’re just doing it in a calmer, slower manner. We’ve got to concentrate on ourselves. We weren’t present today, but this won’t be a big setback for us. There are still plenty of games before the end of the season and we’ve got enough quality to stay up. It just needs to come together for us. We’ve got to take our chances, even if we only have one-a-game. It won’t help us if we dwell on us sitting in the bottom three. We’ve just got to keep moving forward.”