“We want a positive start to the season”

FC Augsburg’s first match of the Bundesliga season 2017/18 is this Saturday 19th august (15:30 CEST) against Hamburger SV. New transfer Michael Gregoritsch, who arrived from HSV this summer, is looking forward to playing against his former team-mates: “I’m really excited for the HSV match. I learned a lot with Hamburg. I made a lot of friends there and felt at home, but once we get on the pitch it’s completely different.” Learn from the mistakes in the cup match FC Augsburg played “well under their level” in the game against FC Magdeburg according to Manuel Baum. “We didn’t do the easy things properly; we made too many technical mistakes and that cannot happen against Hamburg. We want to put into practice what we’ve been working on in training.” Against Hamburg, FCA are coming up against a team “whose quality wasn’t reflected in their league ranking”, according to Manuel Baum. The FCA manager is full of praise for HSV’s performance last year: “They had a stable second season in the top tier and stayed up despite many thinking they would get relegated.” FCA ready to defy relegation candidate tag FCA comes into the game against HSV with a lot of confidence. The team don’t view themselves as relegation candidates, despite what many people have been saying. “I don’t care about the statistics pundits have been using to make their predictions,” declared Manuel Baum. His words are echoed by Michael Gregoritsch: “The relegation tag gives us even more strength. We want to surprise people this season!” With their aggressive pressing game off the ball and a creative and confident offensive attacking philosophy, the Red and Whites are aiming to guarantee safety in the Bundesliga as quickly as possible. The whole squad apart from Jan Moravek trained on Thursday. Moravek is recovering from muscular problems, but Baum isn’t worried: “It’s not serious; we’re just taking it slowly with him”. Raúl Bobadilla is also missing because of his transfer to Borussia M’gladbach in training.