For all teams in the Oberliga Niederrhein, the season started again last weekend. Ratingen, on the other hand, could comfortably look at the results from the sofa.

The Oberliga Niederrhein league season resumed last weekend. While Sportfreunde Baumberg slipped up, Ratingen 04/19 had a good laugh. The team in second place in the table was able to follow the start of the second half of the season comfortably via the RS live ticker. 04/19 had a free weekend on match day 19.

Martin Hasenpflug’s team saw league leaders Baumberg lose 2-0 to bottom-of-the-league TSV Meerbusch. This provided a great opportunity for the Ratingen club, which is hoping to make it into the regional league, to catch the eye.

This means that the Hasenpflug team is hot on the heels of the Sportfreunde. With a game in hand and just three points behind, Ratingen is in a lurking position.

However, coach Hasenpflug does not want to talk much about the mistake: “It was in the media that we would have been the big winners of the match day. Well, we don’t have more points in our account now than we did before. We don’t want to look at the competition at all, we want to focus on our own homework.”

This is a club that has developed strongly in recent years and grown incredibly – as has the team itself.

Martin Hasenpflug on VfB 03 Hilden: “We are the underdogs in the battle for promotion.
To make the most of this, we must never lose our focus and certainly not be lulled into a false sense of security just because someone from above has slipped up.”

04/19 wants to make an immediate statement against their first competitive opponent of the new year, VfB 03 Hilden. No easy task. Hilden, currently in fourth place with 30 points, can still hope to be promoted, and with good reason.

Hasenpflug is humble ahead of the chase: “I definitely see Hilden as the favorite in this game. It’s a club that has developed strongly in recent years and grown incredibly – and the same goes for the team itself. I also think that they have beaten us in the last four or five games. We are therefore approaching this task with humility.”