Alexander Blessin managed the feat of summing up the complex emotional situation at FC St. Pauli in just a few sentences. The coach took a deep breath, exhaled deeply and turned his gaze to the plenum in the press room before he once again started singing the finest Swabian mouth song. “It’s like that,” said Blessin, clutching two cardboard coffee cups stacked on top of each other in his hands: “If you have seven points after three match days and then a lot is being interpreted from the outside, that doesn’t leave you unscathed.”
“Staying away” was difficult, added Blessin, at some point you found yourself in a “downward spiral”, which was further intensified by internal “quarrels”. His easy-to-understand solution: stay with yourself. Hide the outside. And after five defeats in a row, take this dramatic advance in the second round of the DFB Cup for what it is: as a Tuesday evening in which everything was included that makes cup evenings so gripping and stressful – in which, through this constant tightrope walk between winning and losing, between joy and suffering, but also a greater realization could lie. Where better to steel the nerves needed for the relegation battle than in a football game like this?
According to the score sheet, the St. Paulians triumphed 8:7 over TSG Hoffenheim. Previously, a total of 14 shooters had to take part in the penalty shootout, and the course of the game had to move first in one direction and then in the other. The Kiezkickers took the lead in the first minute, defender Hauke Wahl pushed a corner over the line. This was followed by what was probably the most convincing thing about the Blessin team’s performance, especially in view of the disappointments of the previous weeks: St. Pauli performed like St. Pauli again, stubborn, structured, concentrated. Even after minor and major setbacks, the Kiezkickers bravely returned to their order, this applied both to the phase after Hoffenheim’s 1-1 draw by Grischa Prömel (47th) and to the final act after Andrej Kramaric’s 1-2 draw in extra time (107th minute). The midfield organizer Joel Chima Fujita played one clean pass after the other in the first half, the defensive chief and captain Eric Smith braced himself against the hectic pace that broke out, and the “quarrels” mentioned by Blessin at the press conference gave the Kiezkickers the necessary intensification during counterattacks: The attackers Andréas Hountondji and Oladapo Afolayan had recently gotten carried away in a fight in training, on Tuesday they stood together in the starting line-up. Afolayan tried a lot and he succeeded in some things.
Martijn Kaars, the most expensive signing in the club’s history, is noticeably unlucky – but at least scores in the penalty shootout
The lightning-fast Hountondji opened up a gap here and there with his deep runs, but he still maintains a downright hostile relationship with the ball: in the unofficial rankings for stumbling, the 23-year-old from Benin is likely to be in the undisputed first place in Germany’s professional leagues. Because his rivals in attack, Mathias Pereira Lage and Martijn Kaars, who joined in the summer, had recently fallen into worrying lows in form, the late evening events perhaps sent a groundbreaking signal: Substitute Pereira Lage scored 2-2 in stoppage time in extra time and secured St. Pauli’s participation in the penalty shootout, in which the Portuguese missed his attempt. Instead, the otherwise conspicuously hapless Dutchman Kaars met there, with a transfer fee of four million euros, after all, the most expensive entry in the history of the neighborhood club. At the decisive penalty, defender Wahl once again held his nerve; However, the basic work was done by goalkeeper Ben Voll, actually number two behind Nikola Vasilj in the internal hierarchy.
The two keepers had an expert exchange before the penalty shootout and, according to Voll, came to an uncomplicated conclusion: just listen to your “gut feeling”. In any case, they parried two Hoffenheim attempts and, like the rest of the Kiezkickers, put in a really decent performance. “We showed character, everyone raised their hands when it came to penalties,” explained captain Smith, who believes his team is “finally back on the right track.” Next stage: Borussia Mönchengladbach, at the home game on Saturday at Hamburg’s Millerntor. Cup triumph no matter what, cup triumph no matter what. Class warfare remains the order of the day in St. Pauli.