2,123 days or almost six years separate the match at the weekend and the last time SC travelled to Bochum for a league fixture. What appears a relatively short time has felt like an eternity in footballing terms. Whilst Christian Streich’s side were promoted to Germany’s top flight in 2015/16, VfL fans had to wait until the summation of the 2020/21 season to celebrate their club’s promotion to the Bundesliga.

The last time Freiburg played Bochum away from home, a time when current players Nicolas Höfler, Christian Günter and Vincenzo Grifo were already established in the SC starting XI, the hosts came away 2-0 winners, but Freiburg now have an opportunity to avenge this defeat against the newly-promoted side who currently sit in mid-table after the opening twelve matchdays of the season.

SC will need to put in a better performance than they did last weekend during the home defeat to Eintracht Frankfurt if they wish to achieve this. “We really put the pressure on in the second half and we possibly could have done that even more. We had enough chances to decide the game for ourselves, but we were a little unlucky in our play,” summarised SC head coach Christian Streich a few days after the match against Frankfurt.

They will certainly need to be more clinical in front of goal this weekend due to Bochum’s strong defence when playing in front of a home crowd. “They’ve performed very well in their home matches and do not concede many chances. We need to be at the top of our game and make sure we come away the happier side. We’ll have to work really, really hard against Bochum,” explained Streich, who will take charge of his 300th Bundesliga game as Freiburg head coach on Saturday.

There haven’t been many personnel changes compared to last weekend’s home fixture. Nils Petersen returned to team training this week, but will remain unavailable for the weekend, and Jonathan Schmid has also been ruled out.