Thomas Tuchel spoke about the victory, the upcoming semi-final against Bayern Munich and Alexander Isak's debut in the press conference that followed the DFB Cup clash with Sportfreunde Lotte. "We spared no effort. The attitude, attention and hard work we showed formed the basis," the coach said.

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Thomas Tuchel on…

…the balance of play:
"We prepared in great detail for this match. Before the initial fixture date we held three meetings, then this time we had another two. There were many patterns of play that we wanted to prepare our players for. We have got ourselves a deserved win, the importance of which I believe cannot be overestimated. My team deserve a big compliment. We dealt with everything that awaited us: the pitch, the passion and hardness of the opposition, the fans, lots of long balls, lots of defending. We spared no effort. The attitude, attention and hard work we showed formed the basis that allowed us to show our talent, our spatial organisation and our quality from around the 20th minute onwards. So I'm very happy with my team."

…on Sportfreunde Lotte:
"Even though he won't want to hear it right now, I would still like to congratulate my fellow coach Ismail Atalan on reaching this quarter-final. I think it's an outstanding feat, achieved not only by the players but by the entire team that surrounds them as well."

…the semi-final duel with Bayern:
"Even before the match, people were talking about that, so it was important for us to block that out. Part of the challenge against Lotte tonight was to ignore this idea that the draw for the semi-finals was already set in stone. As for the match against Bayern, it's a semi-final. We'll go there to win. But it's still too early to say precisely how we want to do that."

…Alexander Isak's debut and his prospects:
"He needs to stay patient, because in Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and André Schürrle we have two players who play in exactly the same position as him. He is still very young and needs to adapt to the intensity of the training. It's also difficult to simply throw him in. Unfortunately he arrived so late that we wasn't able to join our mid-season preparations and he also missed our friendlies. With all the matches going on at the moment there is not much training going on, so it's tough for him to find his feet. Nonetheless, we immediately seized the opportunity when Auba was ruled out this morning. We all need to be patient, he probably more than anyone else. He'll make good progress at this club, I'm sure of that." (djg)