In a home game with the date 19.09. the players of Borussia Dortmund would never want to be naked. Without dots, these four numbers correspond to the year the club was founded. A victory is a matter of honor. On Sunday evening against Union Berlin, the Borussia again showed two weaknesses, but their offensive strength overcompensated for the defensive weaknesses again into a spectacle. BVB won 4: 2 (2: 0) in front of 25,000 spectators and kept their position in the top group. The coach Marco Rose could like that exactly when they travel to Mönchengladbach next Saturday evening, to his ex-club, which is falling down the Bundesliga basement stairs.
“We made it unnecessarily exciting again by conceding two stupid goals,” criticized the captain Marco Reus. After all, BVB had already led 3-0 by the 57th minute. “We have to work on that as quickly as possible; we have to play more grown-up,” demanded Reus. The fact that all three major games were won within nine days (4: 3 at Bayer Leverkusen, 2: 1 at Besiktas Istanbul, 4: 2 against Union Berlin) was ultimately what pleased Reus.
BVB entered the game with an unchanged starting eleven after the victory at Besiktas in the Champions League, because Rose did not have the feeling that his core formation needed recovery – rather the development of automatisms. The fact that Taiwo Awoniyi scored for Union after 43 seconds only meant a brief shock, because it quickly became clear that it was offside.
This suspicion was not in the air nine minutes later when a dream goal by the Portuguese Raphael Guerreiro could be viewed. The left-back, who is perceived as a winger in view of Dortmund’s always offensive game, had already scored a dream goal in Leverkusen a week earlier with a free kick. But this one was even more remarkable because it was out of the game. On the left hand in the Berlin penalty area, the ball bobbed up calf when Guerreiro pulled and shot from a steep angle high over the goalkeeper Andreas Luthe into the corner.
Without conceding a goal, Dortmund obviously doesn’t feel comfortable
“We’re doing quite well on the offensive,” said Rose about the general strength of his team before kick-off and saw himself confirmed early on by Guerreiro’s goal. “We want to do better against the ball,” Rose had also said, but there was no all-clear in this regard. “Be careful in Zone 2!”, Union coach Urs Fischer had told his players, but they were obviously afraid of losing the ball in this zone, so they hardly dared to venture out at first.
The Dortmunders suspected that hit patterns from the 4: 3 spectacle in Leverkusen could be reproduced well. So right-back Thomas Meunier hit a cross into the center in the 24th minute, as in the 1-0 win in Leverkusen, where Erling Haaland headed in to make it 2-0. Union looked a bit sleepy after his trip to Prague for the Conference League game. Union opened the second half in the wider area “Zone 2”. They now ventured out of cover. They also had to. But this happened quickly in the 52nd minute: Dortmund’s counter-move, Jude Bellingham steeply on Marco Reus side into the penalty area, ball into the center, there defender Marvin Friedrich could no longer evade and scored the 0: 3 with an own goal.
Without conceding a goal, the Dortmunders obviously don’t feel comfortable. So they gave Union the first. A nice gesture. Because Axel Witsel stepped on the foot of Kevin Behrens from Berlin, Max Kruse was allowed to shoot in a penalty kick to 1: 3 in the 57th minute. The hit gave the Berliners another boost. They suddenly brought BVB defensive into trouble several times and even scored a 2: 3 goal with a header from Andreas Voglsammer in the 81st minute. But two minutes later Haaland made everything clear with the 4-2. After a long ball from Mats Hummels, he overtook the goalkeeper Luthe and thus secured victory.
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