Halle FC head into the winter break with two defeats. The HFC coach was angry after the 3-2 defeat at Rot-Weiss Essen.

Hallescher FC spent a bitter few days in the Ruhr region. On Saturday, the club from Saxony-Anhalt lost 2-1 at Borussia Dortmund II.

HFC did not make the 500-kilometer journey home and stayed in North Rhine-Westphalia. In Velbert, coach Sreto Ristic’s team prepared for Tuesday’s match at Rot-Weiss Essen. HFC were determined to secure a win in their final game of the season.

And in front of 14,887 fans in the stadium on Hafenstrasse, it looked good for a long time. Halle led 2-0 in Essen and 2-1 up until the 80th minute, before Enrique Lofolomo’s own goal made it 2-2 and then Leonardo Vonic scored the winner to give Essen a 3-2 lead.

The team from Halle were down. Captain Jonas Nietfeld said on “Magenta Sport”: “Our triple chance, where we could have made it 3:0, was the crux of the matter. We had to decide the game there. Essen then threw themselves into everything. Nevertheless, two goals away from home have to be enough. That’s incredibly bitter.”

HFC coach Ristic was even clearer than his captain. The former Bundesliga striker for VfB Stuttgart could not believe what he had experienced in the Ruhr region over the last few days.

Ristic: “To lose these two away games in such a short space of time is really inexplicable. We should actually be leading 3:0 or 4:0. Unfortunately, we have to accept that, we have no other choice. It can’t be that we always need three or four goals to win games. We defend very naively in many situations. We need a lot of luck. We have a lot of work to do. You could also see what Essen substituted and what we substituted.”

Halle go into the winter break with 18 points from 19 games and are in serious danger of relegation. But Nietfeld has hope: “In recent years, we’ve always improved in the second half of the season. I’ll remind the boys of that and hope it will be the same again. “