FC St. Pauli

With carnival strongholds across the country practically grinding to a halt on Thursday as the festivities and high jinks began, life in Hamburg carried on as normal. The players buckled down in training and the fans compiled their playlists for the journey to East Westphalia featuring the worst pop songs of the 1990s, while in Paderborn they put out warnings about the ruthlessness of the Boys in Brown.

"St. Pauli have lots of individual quality and are capable of making something from nothing," said Paderborn boss Steffen Baumgart at the media conference before Saturday's game at the Benteler Arena. "They don't produce much in the way of attacking fireworks, but they're always dangerous." When it comes to fireworks (on the pitch, mark you), Paderborn do have the edge over the Boys in Brown, it has to be said. The home side have already scored 54 goals this term, leaving them second only to FC Cologne in this ranking. But as the league leaders found out to their cost a couple of weeks ago, Steffen Baumgart's team are capable of anything this season, coming from 2-0 down with 12 minutes left to beat Cologne 3-2.

Markus Kauczinski's charges thus go to Paderborn forewarned, yet relaxed after the 1-0 victory over Ingolstadt. "After losing to Cologne and Aue, we were determined to get a win," Waldemar Sobota told FC St. Pauli TV during the week. "We managed to do that, and you could sense how much good that did us during the week." The win over Ingolstadt wasn't that much of a surprise, however. A look at the first half the season shows that the Boys in Brown were able to recover from back-to-back defeats against Cologne and Aue by going on to beat Ingolstadt and, for that matter, Paderborn. An omen for Saturday?

We won't have anything against a repeat of those results, of course, but that will be anything but easy, given that the Boys in Brown have yet to win at Paderborn in the second division. Six outings to the Benteler Arena have brought three draws and three defeats so far, to which can be added last season's exit from the DFB Cup. So what can be done to reverse that trend? "We have to be brave and seek our chance going forward," said Kauczinski. By that, we hasten to add, he wasn't referring to the carnival procession in Paderborn that gets under way at a quarter past three tomorrow afternoon.

Photos: Witters