ZAt the end of a wild football game, the Dortmunders stood quite lost on the lawn, their eyes were on the ground, disappointed, frustrated and probably a little embarrassed. The 4-2 defeat at Borussia Mönchengladbach was annoying, but even more painful was the view of the gloomy overall situation, which can’t be changed until the end of January.
“Uneasy weeks” are ahead of the club, said sporting director Sebastian Kehl after the Revier club, which started the season as one of the favorites for the Bundesliga title, goes into the winter break in sixth place in the table. Teams like Bayern Munich, Eintracht Frankfurt, RB Leipzig, but also Union Berlin and SC Freiburg simply play better football, is the bitter realization.
Dortmund were even worse after 15 match days in 2017 under Peter Bosz, who was immediately released. With the following coaches, BVB had scored 39 (2018), 29 (2019), 31 (2021) and 28 (2022) points at the same time, now there are 25.
“We start at minus”
The project with Edin Terzic is stalled and stuck, that much can be said before the long break. After beating VfL Bochum 3-0 a week ago, Dortmund still hoped to be “fully involved” despite the many footballing deficits in the winter, said Terzic, now the coach explained with a view to the second half of the season: “We’re not starting from scratch , but we start at minus.”
The analyzes carried out by those responsible late on Friday evening did not go much deeper at the end of a severely disappointing half-year. “We have a few issues that we have to work on, on offense, in terms of standard situations, but also on defense,” said sporting director Sebastian Kehl, which translates as something like: Actually nothing works really well in this team.
One hope lies in the return of injured key players, captain Marco Reus is now making a solid recovery, goalscorer Sebastién Haller may recover soon, while midfielder Mahmoud Dahoud is also expected to return.
The central problem, however, is that once again it has not been possible to form a functioning collective that is more than a loose collection of a few very good individual players. This was shown in Mönchengladbach with astonishing clarity.
Strong collectives are able to win duels as a team, explained Julian Brandt, who scored a nice goal to make it 1-1 (19 ‘). At BVB, on the other hand, “everyone plays individually: One goes out, then he is overplayed, then the next one comes.”
The team must learn “to function like a kind of school of fish,” explained Brandt and, referring to SC Freiburg or Union Berlin, pointed out competitors “who do it excellently and are successful with it.” in Dortmund again no healthy team spirit emerged.
Schlotterbeck over-motivated
And so people like Emre Can or Raphael Guerreiro, as is so often the case in Mönchengladbach, somehow listlessly carried out work to rule. Mats Hummels gets on everyone’s nerves with his public criticism, even Jude Bellingham is finding it increasingly difficult to work for his colleagues.
And Nico Schlotterbeck seems like an over-motivated activist and produced one mistake after the next. Before Jonas Hofmann made it 1-0, he missed the moment to pick up the scorer and interfere with the shot (4th), before Ramy Bensebaini made it 2-1, he misjudged a header, whereupon Mats Hummels felt forced to commit a foul.
The subsequent free kick led to another Gladbach lead. And before the 3: 1 Schlotterbeck defended so risky that Marcus Thuram had a clear path to the goal after a short increase in speed and pushed the ball into the net (33rd).
After all, Schlotterbeck scored his first goal for BVB in his weakest half of the season so far (4th) and thus initially kept the crazy game open, which was decided with Manu Koné’s 4-2 immediately after the break.
“To be honest, I’m just missing the point. It can’t be explained,” Kehl said of the almost provocative passivity with which BVB had invited Gladbach to score. It was a sentence that described the complete helplessness with which Dortmund are now going into the long Bundesliga winter. As so often in recent years, the sporting management will carry out a critical analysis, which will not only focus on the expensive squad, but also on the work of coach Edin Terzic.
