Jens Stage speaks on his step up to the Bundesliga
New SV Werder Bremen midfielder Jens Stage has both intrigued and perplexed Bundesliga audiences with his play this year.
In a brief interview with Tim Lüddecke of German footballing magazine Kicker, the 25-year-old spoke on the importance of not letting his chance go to waste.
SV Werder Bremen trainer Ole Werner's two regular buttressing attackers have had injury issues in this young season. Romano Schmid - a promising youngster recently called up by Ralf Rangnick to represent his native Austria for the first time this week - needed some time to recover from a bout with COVID contracted just before the season began. Veteran Leonardo Bittencourt has missed the last two fixtures with a bone edema and may be out longer.
In a brief interview with Tim Lüddecke of German footballing magazine Kicker, the 25-year-old spoke on the importance of not letting his chance go to waste.
Bittencourt and Schmid remain familiar names to Bundesliga watchers. After all, the pair featured regularly for Werder in the two tough seasons preceding their 2020/21 campaign relegation. Werner wasn't coaching the squad at that time, but it was tacitly assumed that he preferred these two top-tier experienced attackers to work behind the double-striker tandem of Niklas Füllkrug and Marvin Ducksch.
Their absence has introduced German football fans to a new face; one who's name pronunciation required a bit of clarification. Twenty-five-year-old midfielder Jens Stage's last name is pronounced precisely as it appears in English. Some German football announcers had to quickly learn how to correct a player with a name they assumed would be pronounced [STAH-geh].
Stage's performances - he's featured prominently in five of Werner's six starting XIs - have definitely caught the eye of German football fans and "Stage makes the most of his time on the stage" variants circulate in German footballing circles. Werner nevertheless left the Dane out of the XI against Bochum in round five and might be compelled to do so again after the former FC Copenhagen man missed a crucial chance in last Friday's loss to Augsburg.
"There certainly is a lot of room for improvement," Stage noted when speaking to Tim Lüddecke of German footballing magazine Kicker, "I can do better. It was a big step for me [moving to the Bundesliga]. I have to prove myself every day."
Stage's move from the champions off the Danish Superliga to a newly promoted Bundesliga club. At the time of his transfer, the amount Bremen paid for his services was not disclosed. Since his rise on the footballing radar, German sources now speak of a €4 million price tag. Even when Schmid and Bittencourt are both fully fit again, Werner may wish to stick with his relative newcomer.
"I want to show everyone that I'm here to help the team," Stage noted in his interview, "I'm here to do the hard work first. Then comes the fine tuning."
What most Bundesliga observers have noticed about Stage concerns his high intensity when pressing off the ball. The Dane seemed to know just what his strong suit was whilst conducting an interview mostly in English. Lüddecke noted that one of the few German words Stage used was "Zweikämpfe" ("duels").
"I'd like to be more involved in Bremen's game and in the duels," Stage emphasized.
As Stage brushes up on his German vocabulary and German football fans learn how to pronounce his name, it looks to be the case that the two sides are making the most of this early acquaintance.