Borussia Dortmund’s victory over Carlo Ancelotti’s side has left the Bundesliga champions in a spot of bother at Säbener Strasse
“Willpower”, “passion”, “aggressiveness”, “fight”. The message was a familiar one in Dortmund ahead of the match, but the messenger wasn’t. Thomas Tuchel, the 43-year-old head boy of the so-called “laptop coaches” in German, young, cerebral, strategy-obsessed managers who prefer a cold, hard look at the numbers to heated rhetoric, had ventured deep into Jürgen Klopp territory on Friday, proclaiming the need to harness the emotional power of the occasion and to add a crucial “third level” to go with tactics and technique.
“That will be the basis of beating Bayern,” Tuchel confidently predicted. And he was right. Borussia Dortmund, by their own admission, didn’t have their best game against the German champions on Saturday night, but their remarkable ability “to hang in there and not give up” in the face of the visitors’ relentless if ultimately imprecise attacks got them over the line by the narrowest of margins. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s 11th-minute winner, a goal scrambled in with a stretched out leg and celebrated with push-ups in honour of French rapper Gradur (whose “Sheguey 10 - Tractions” video exalts the joys of a rigorous workout) befitted the gritty nature of proceedings. “At the moment, we find it a bit hard to play with the ball, that’s why we had to battle,” André Schürrle said, “it was proper grown-up stuff today.”
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