FC St. Pauli

Director of sport Andreas Bornemann: “You have to show some understanding. We had an emotional explosion on Sunday after that amazing game at Frankfurt. When that gets to your legs, you lack a few per cent. We’ll celebrate today but we also need to learn the right lessons from the game. We have to go to the limit every time in this league, both mentally and physically. We were a good way short of that today against a team who obviously had nothing to win and nothing to lose. We tripped ourselves up today, but I can’t be angry with this team. They’ve been exceptional over the last two or three years. We’re where we deserve to be in the table. We want to be a Bundesliga side and now we’ve taken a small step in that direction. It’s a foot in the door at most because this league is so challenging and some even bigger teams will probably come up next season, so the challenge for us won’t get any smaller. We’re obviously delighted about being able to take that challenge on, though.”

Head coach Alexander Blessin: “We reached our peak last week and dropped off again straightaway. We wanted to give the fans something  back. We were well in the game in the opening stages, but we lacked a lot of the basics. At half-time Bochum had won 60 per cent of the tackles and that says it all really. We often arrived too late and made the wrong decisions. There’s a lot you can find fault with today but I don’t care. This performance won’t see me allowing any criticism of the team. We’ve performed really well all season and deserved to stay up. We’re looking forward to another year in the Bundesliga. We know we’re going to have to work really hard to do it again. We deserved to lose today but we deserve to stay up just as much.”

Nikola Vasilj: “You can lose games but not like we did today. We weren’t 100 per cent in the game and made lots of mistakes. Our positional play wasn’t good. I’ll need a couple of minutes to get over it. The fans were outstanding today, as they have been all season. We have to apologise to them for today, but we’re staying up and that’s the most important thing, so we’re going to celebrate. It’s been a long season and it was tough at times but we put in a lot of good performances. Playing in the Bundesliga was something I’d dreamed about. I’ve enjoyed it and can look back at an excellent season.”

David Nemeth: “We’re very unhappy with the performance. It definitely wasn’t how we were supposed to play or how we wanted to play. That said, we can celebrate staying up now. We can be proud of the season we've had with the possible exception of the two Bochum games. We can be really proud to be staying in this league and the way we did it. We’ve given our all and we now want to party.”

Dieter Hecking (Bochum head coach): “Congratulations to St. Pauli on staying up. It’s not self-evident for St. Pauli to stay up. They’ve done an outstanding job. After our last performance we wanted to show our good side today, get a result and go out with a good feeling. The disappointment is tangible even though we won because we would have liked to stay in this league and we would have liked to come back here next year for the atmosphere. The performance today was OK. We gave little away at the back, we had our moments up front and we were good in transition. Although we’ve gone down, the players have always shown character, so credit to them. There was hope we could do it after we won at Bayern Munich, but we couldn’t get the momentum on our side and we didn’t get the results. You deserve to go down if you finish on 25 points. We’ll look forward now and make use of the next few weeks. We’ll need to rebuild.”

Photos: FC St. Pauli/Witters