"Expected it to have clicked": Mistakes again and again

Minutes after his 1. FC Magdeburg lost 3-2 (1:2) at Hertha BSC, Baris Atik, who had captained the team, wavered somewhere between anger, disappointment and resignation. "I just expected that after two games where we did well, it would click and we'd get it. But we fell back into our old pattern," explained the goalscorer when Magdeburg took a 1:0 lead.

The old patterns are the individual mistakes that have plagued the Elbe club all season and cost them points time and time again. Against Hertha on Friday evening, it was three of them that caused the goals conceded and brought an astonishingly passive opponent back into the game and then onto the winning track.

If you look at Magdeburg's defeats, individual blunders have already cost them at least eight points this season. Points that would have catapulted FCM much closer to the goal of staying in the league and the "carefree further development" originally proclaimed by sporting director Otmar Schork. The problem: time and again, another professional fails to perform, and a simple personnel change is not enough.

"I believe that we are one of the best teams in terms of play, but it also takes a lot," Atik went on to analyze and listed: "It takes courage, a clean passing game, a clean first touch - and that's where the next step has to come." The Elbe club can and must take that step on Saturday evening against table-topping Schalke 04. The defeat at Schalke in the first leg - triggered by one of these individual slip-ups - was the start of a black streak of seven league games in a row without a win.

A mortgage that Magdeburg are still nibbling away at - and one that they cannot afford to repeat. But in addition to the anger over the mistakes, there are also things that make FCM optimistic ahead of the highlight against Schalke in the sold-out MDCC Arena, as defender Tobias Müller emphasized: "There has hardly been a game this season where the opponent was better than Magdeburg. We simply have to learn from these mistakes, because the quality is simply there in the second division to punish that."

A three-pointer against the Gelsenkirchen side would be worth its weight in gold, as it would put FCM on 30 points - and would then need ten points from eleven games to reach the 40 points that are the rule of thumb for staying in the league. The crowd should also be a plus point for FCM against Schalke. Even Hertha coach Pál Dardai recently praised the Magdeburg supporters: "Before the game, I had goosebumps at how the fans did everything for Magdeburg."