After a difficult week, the English teenager scored the winner against Schalke as Borussia Dortmund continue their chargeIt was dark when Borussia Dortmund’s bus arrived back at the club’s training ground in Brackel but it couldn’t get in. It was blocked by several hundred supporters, chanting and lighting the winter night with pyro. A couple of the players, Axel Witsel and Achraf Hakimi, got off the coach and joined them.This may already be shaping up to be a special season for Dortmund but if you wondered what this dream start – unbeaten in the Bundesliga, soaring above champions Bayern Munich having beaten them in Der Klassiker last month, through to the Champions League last 16 – was missing, then here...
Borussia Dortmund’s victory despite an impressive Bayern Munich performance shows how far they have come and how competitive the German league is this seasonThe 95 minutes-plus of Der Klassiker – and every extra second of the 47 over the 95, which was felt keenly by Borussia Dortmund’s coach Lucien Favre, pushed up tensely on to the edge of his technical area, waving his arms maniacally – were part of such a dizzying swirl of fluctuating momentums and emotions that it’s hard to pick a moment to distil it.If we were going to try, though, how about 13 seconds before Paco Alcácer’s winner hit the net as Dortmund, typically for a Favre side, tore Bayern apart at the seams on the...
Adi Hütter had a tough start at Eintracht Frankfurt but his team have now found their feet as Stuttgart discovered on FridayWhen the opposition is down, keep your foot on the throat. In the infancy of his tenure but already desperate for a result, Stuttgart’s coach Markus Weinzierl would have hoped for opponents without that type of focus as his team opened the Bundesliga weekend at an anxious Mercedes-Benz Arena on Friday night. Unfortunately, he and they bumped into Eintracht Frankfurt instead.Few expected this to be much of a season for last term’s DfB Pokal winners after Niko Kovac’s departure for Bayern Munich even if his replacement, Adi Hütter, was coming off a Swiss Super League win with Young Boys...
The 6-2 win was a fine display that deserved to be celebrated, but it also drove home how far short they have fallenThe Bundesliga loves a left turn, and this weekend it saved its best one for the programme’s final fixture. This was supposed to be resurgent Werder Bremen’s day, when victory would have taken them into second place behind Borussia Dortmund, confirming a return to relevance in the extraordinary debut year at the helm of coach Florian Kohfeldt, who celebrates a year in charge on Tuesday.With just over an hour gone it looked like it still could be, even though they had gone into the break 3-0 down to visiting Bayer Leverkusen. Yuya Osako’s goal, eventually awarded after VAR...
If the purpose of Friday’s club address was to make the champions seem less vulnerable, you have to question its valueIt was as tumultuous as anticipated, only in a totally different manner than anybody had expected. When Bayern Munich called a Friday press conference with the president Uli Hoeness, chief executive Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, coach Niko Kovac and sporting director, Hasan Salihamidzic, all confirmed to be present, it was clear they wouldn’t just be talking about the forthcoming weekend visit to Wolfsburg and delivering injury news updates.The rumour mill swirled into some weird places. Was Arsène Wenger about to be appointed as coach, notwithstanding the highly unlikely scenario of Kovac being present at his own dethroning? Was Kovac going to be...