“I can only apologize to my teammates.”

VfL Wolfsburg squad captain Maximilian Arnold apologized to his colleagues after his missed penalty left his team on a four-match-winless run on Friday night.

There were indeed many issues that precluded VfL Wolfsburg from taking more than a point off of lowly, last-placed Schalke in the 2022/23 German Bundesliga’s round 20 curtain-raiser. VfL skipper Maximilian Arnold lamented the fact that his team somehow couldn’t find the right posture over the course of 90 long minutes.

“We played far too uncourageously,” Arnold told the DAZN microphones last night, “We needed to play out of the back better and more cleanly. And we defended carelessly. Koen Casteels did an outstanding job of keeping us in the game twice, so this is a point we have to take today.”

Arnold called the final result “relatively fortunate” in the context of Wolfsburg’s play.

“We must honestly admit that today was a poor performance,” Arnold said, “We have to demonstrate better play. Let’s acknowledge that Schalke were bold and we didn’t find our way into our game at all.”

Something else Arnold naturally had to acknowledge concerned the fact that he bore some personal responsibility for the disappointing result. Perhaps Wolfsburg’s best chance in the game came less than ten minutes in. The Lower Saxon guests were awarded a penalty in the 9th minute when the VAR team confirmed that Moritz Jenz tripped up Patrick Wimmer in the penalty area. Arnold smashed the spot kick off the post.

“If I make it 1-0, it’s a completely different game,” Arnold conceded, “We then didn’t establish the tone. Simply dumb when one can’t sink it from 11 meters out. I can only apologize to my teammates. That’s honestly quite bitter.”

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