Kevin Stöger is VfL Bochum’s man for the stationary balls. Ahead of the match against VfL Wolfsburg, he spoke about penalty strategies and free-kick luck.
On Saturday (3:30 p.m., live in the RS ticker), VfL Bochum will face VfL Wolfsburg at home.
Should coach Thomas Letsch’s team be awarded a penalty or a free kick from a promising position, Kevin Stöger will take the ball. RevierSport spoke to him.
After the draw against Union Berlin, you spoke quite openly about your penalty-taking strategy. Do you have to change that concept now?
Of course, every now and then I take the ball after training and ask if a goalkeeper has time to take a few penalties. Of course, I said something about my last penalty (“Normally, no keeper stops, as soon as you shoot in the middle, it’s in”, ed.). But it’s not now that I’m going to shoot in the middle the next few times as well. I’ll continue to analyze the goalkeepers and then hopefully put the next one in.
Recently, you often missed the famous centimeters on free kicks. When will you score the next free kick?
They say all good things come in threes. The last two free kicks hit the crossbar, so I hope the next one goes in. But it would be all the nicer if this goal brings us something countable, because we definitely want to score on Saturday. That’s why it doesn’t matter whether I score the goal or someone else does. I just want us to play a good game, especially at home, and we’ll definitely get at least a point.
VfL Wolfsburg is our guest. VfL Bochum didn’t stand a chance in the 0:4 first leg. A bad omen?
We recently had the scenario with Leipzig. We played a really bad game in the first leg and deserved to lose. But we won at home, and deservedly so. I’m hoping for the same result against Wolfsburg. The first leg wasn’t good there either, but we now have the chance to make up for it and get the next three points. We’ll do everything we can to do that.
A win against Wolfsburg would be a milestone in the direction of staying in the relegation zone, what is important on Saturday?
Of course, those would be extremely important points for us, and that’s how we’re going into the game. We’ll also play our game again. I think we’ll do well if we don’t focus too much on the opponent, but trust our game to deliver our performance. That’s exactly how we will start on Saturday. We want to play active soccer, challenge the opponent and I hope we can celebrate three points together there in front of our great fans.