Edin Terzic was angry and he made no effort to hide it. “Today it was once again very visible what has been lacking for years to constantly knock at the top,” said the Borussia Dortmund coach after the stirring 2: 3 (1: 0) in Cologne and continued: “We were not ready to take the last three or four steps. Not ready to defend our goal at a very important stage of the game. That annoys us tremendously.”
Before the big tasks in Seville (Wednesday) and against Bayern Munich (Saturday), BVB seemed to master the high hurdle in Cologne impressively. After 45 minutes Borussia was first in the table – in the end they found themselves in fourth place after their third defeat of the young season.
“Again” he couldn’t show his team a recording of 20 successful offensive actions, Terzic complained, because he had to work through the mistakes first. In his general statement, the coach only omitted the names. But first of all, everyone could see how carelessly the strikers Adeyemi and Malen and also the offensively outstanding Julian Brandt worked backwards; how the central defense went swimming without Mats Hummels. Secondly, these sharply intoned words were unusual for the club anyway, which does not seem to be able to cope with its role as Bayern hunter this season either.
Edin Terzic does not want to be one of the BVB coaches who saved with criticism of the players
If you look at the list of BVB coaches since 2008, you might be surprised how rarely the players have been publicly held accountable by their coaches. Jurgen Klopp, the face of the club until 2015, took the blame last season together when the club fell back to last place in between.
His successor Thomas Tuchel preferred to quarrel with his boss Hans-Joachim Watzke than with the team. Peter Bosz stumbled over his somewhat monotonous idea of football (and over the 4:4 – after a 4:0 lead – against Schalke 04); Peter Stöger: far too grateful to be able to sit on the BVB bench; Lucien Favre: much too elegant (and cryptic) to criticize in clear sentences; Edin Terzic on his first assignment on the sidelines: far too successful to have to grumble; Marco Rose: far too busy thinking about the grandstand observer Terzic to look for a liberating noise.
The BVB coach looks a little jealous at Cologne’s “All In” mentality
On his second mission, Terzic is still looking for a balance between offense and defense. He sometimes looks a little jealous of Saturday’s opponent: Within 15 months, FC coach Steffen Baumgart found a way to keep a sometimes lethargic club on a constant stream. The Cologne team was behind in six of eight games, but they still scored five times. Before the game, Terzic had spoken appreciatively of an “all in” mentality in Cologne; he could have done without seeing this assessment immediately confirmed.
In the ten minutes after the change, the hosts acted with a mixture of power and finesse (Kainz and Hector in the lead) that Dortmund apparently hadn’t expected – even though Terzic had explicitly warned against it. However, the trainer refrained from giving the impression that he was working with a group of children who were not able to learn. Terzic said: “It’s just the professional way we want to approach this sport.”