The Werkself players arrived at the ground at midday in a good mood. Several had only returned from their home countries a few hours earlier. However, there was little time to chat as the first training session of the new year was held in the early afternoon.
After the festive break, head coach Xabi Alonso demanded high intensity in every drill and full concentration in a 60-minute session. The 22 outfield players on the training ground on Wednesday included the youngsters Ken Izekor, Francis Onyeka, Reno Münz and Filip Milojevic. Piero Hincapie trained on his own as a purely precautionary measure following slight hip problems from the last Bundesliga match against Bochum at the end of December.
Under the eyes of sporting managing director Simon Rolfes and director of professional teams Thomas Eichin, the main focus in the opening session of the year was on working with the ball and that was followed by sprints. Following the first training session of 2024, the Werkself players took up to 30 minutes to fulfil the many requests from young and old fans for autographs and selfies.
After the session, captain Lukas Hradecky spoke to the media: "We had a great 2023 and we are deservedly top of the table at the moment. But it's also clear that the new year will bring us lots of big challenges. The break did us good and we were able to get a chance to relax. But fortunately it was not too long for us to lose fitness and concentration. We will continue to focus on our work in the coming days as we did last year and we are ready for the games coming up."
The first competitive match for the Werkself in the new year is on Saturday 13 January (kick-off: 15 30 CET) away to FC Augsburg. Four Werkself players will be unavailable in addition to Arthur who missed the opening training session due to injury: Odilon Kossounou (Ivory Coast), Edmond Tapsoba (Burkina Faso), Amine Adli (Morocco) and Victor Boniface (Nigeria) will be at the Africa Cup of Nations with their national teams with the competition starting on Saturday 13 January.
The training session on Thursday 4 January (11.00 CET) is also open to Bayer 04 fans. In addition, tickets are available for the one and only friendly in the current winter break. The match against the Italian second division side Venezia is on Sunday 7 January with the kick off at the BayArena at 15.00 CET. Tickets are available HERE.
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