Kristian Mørch before Kolding: “We need to be fully professional.”

HB Køge Women return to the A-Liga on Friday evening when the team travel away to Kolding IF at Autocentralen Park after nearly three weeks since their last league match against AGF.

Head coach Kristian Mørch is looking forward to having the full squad together again after the international break, during which many players have been away with their respective national teams.

“We’re excited. It may be three weeks since we last played an important match, but in reality, we’ve only had one week together as a team because so many players have been away. It’s a great situation to be in, but it also makes training a bit different when you’re missing 11 players. So it’s great to have them back, and we’re really looking forward to playing together again.”

Even though a large part of the squad has been away during the international break, the break has been put to good use back in Køge.

“We’ve been able to give more attention to a lot of players who haven’t necessarily played many minutes for us this spring. I think they’ve trained really, really well, so it’s been great spending time with them.”

At the same time, the coaching staff have had the opportunity to adjust some of the physical parameters.

“We’ve been able to tweak some physical aspects, so we’ve trained a little less in volume, but a bit harder when we have trained. That has been good for them.”

HB Køge Women go into the match as favourites, but Kristian Mørch expects a difficult task against a Kolding side that has delivered strong performances recently.

“First and foremost, it’s about us dominating the match with the things we want to do. But we need to be aware that Kolding have delivered some really strong performances. They just pushed FC Nordsjælland in a cup match, they were better than Brøndby IF for large parts of their home match, and they have beaten Fortuna Hjørring.”

“We showed ourselves when we played a friendly up there that if we treat it like a friendly and Kolding treat it like a league match, then we are not better than Kolding. So we need to be fully professional and very ambitious in our approach.”

HB Køge Women most recently won 6–1 over Kolding IF, and the head coach hopes for another strong performance on Friday evening.

“When we play with speed, and when we hit Kolding in the areas where their defensive organisation is weak, we create chances. That’s what we need to keep doing. And then we need to make sure it becomes a football match that we want to play.”

“And then we’ll see if we can avoid conceding a penalty this time,” the head coach concludes with a smile.

Kick-off at Autocentralen Park is tomorrow at 6:00 PM. The match can be watched live on TV 2 Sport X with pre-match coverage starting at 5:30 PM. As always, the match can also be followed on our Instagram or Facebook pages.