“We have nothing to lose against Switzerland”

The Hungarian national team takes on Switzerland – who top the group with a 100% record – in Basel this Saturday before taking on the Faroe Islands at home three days later in their final 2018 World Cup qualifier. Bernd Storck’s squad has been training together at Telki since Sunday, with Le Havre right-back Barnabás Bese joining the rest of the team on Tuesday following his club’s match on Monday evening.

“We’re really looking forward to the two upcoming matches, especially the game against Switzerland” began Storck at Monday afternoon’s press conference. “Switzerland have won all eight qualifiers so far, and thus it will be a big challenge to play against them. We’re going into the match with optimism; I’m sure we can produce a similar performance to the ones we gave against Latvia and Portugal”.

“We’ll be without a few players through injury and suspension” he added, before going on to say that “everyone is highly motivated and that’s why I’m certain we’ll hold our own in Basel. We have nothing to lose against Switzerland; we’ll try to make the impossible possible. We scored twice against them at home and we’d like to show that we’re also capable of doing so away from home. We played well as a unit against Latvia and Portugal; we did well from a possession perspective and even tried to attack as much as we could with ten men against the European champions. We were applauded off the field in that game despite losing, and I’d like it if we produced a similar performance against the Swiss”.