It seemed to be over for the Werder Bremen footballers in their salmon-colored away shirts. Their hosts Borussia Dortmund led 2-0 in the 89th minute, when the promoted team from Bremen hit back three times, the game through the jokers Lee Buchanan (89th), Niklas Schmid (93rd) and Oliver Burke (95th) within seven minutes and still won 3:2 (0:1). No team in the Bundesliga has ever scored three goals after the 89th minute. “Insane!” reveled the trainer Ole Werner afterwards.
There had already been late goals in Bremen’s two previous 2-2 draws in Wolfsburg and against Stuttgart. So Dortmund could have been warned, but even if they weren’t, such an embarrassment should not have happened to them in their sacred home stadium. BVB last suffered a defeat at home after a 2-0 lead 40 years ago. Several statistics document how unlikely the events in Dortmund on Saturday afternoon were.
For BVB coach Edin Terzic it was the first defeat in the third game of the season. “Because it wasn’t a good performance from us, the defeat is deserved,” stated Terzic soberly, “nevertheless, of course, she’s brutally annoying.” The approximately 25,000 fans in the south stand were quieter than ever in the closing stages. They couldn’t believe their eyes.
Two long-range shots from Julian Brandt (45+2) and Raphael Guerreiro (77) had given the unimaginative Dortmunders a 2-0 lead, which two minutes before the regular end seemed to mean the third win in the third game. But then Bremen came back and rewarded their long-suffering fans, who after the first away game in Wolfsburg, which was affected by police checks two weeks ago, suffered from the failure of a signal box at Dortmund’s main station and were unable to travel by train as planned because the whole station was blocked day nothing worked.
Maybe Cristiano Ronaldo would have wanted to come by train, maybe there’s no truth to the talk that the multiple world footballer from Manchester United would like to switch to Borussia Dortmund. Terzic described this speculation as “the biggest BVB rumor of all time” before a game began against Bremen in which the home fans would certainly have been happy about a brilliant player like Ronaldo. Dortmund found it difficult. “We had no control and played way too wildly,” complained captain Marco Reus afterwards. “We just didn’t have the same energy as Bremen,” admitted goalkeeper Gregor Kobel.
Oliver Burke chases the ball into the Dortmund goal to make it 3:2.
(Photo: Lars Baron/Getty Images)
At the start of the game, the Dortmund substitutes were home to: Salih Özcan, Giovanni Reyna, Thorgan Hazard, Youssoufa Moukoko, Emre Can, Thomas Meunier and Niklas Süle. That would be more than half the starting eleven at some other clubs. Because Donyell Malen was injured, Terzic opted for players like Marius Wolf, Julian Brandt and Jamie Bynoe-Gittens. The latter lost almost every ball on the left. Brandt, on the other hand, put BVB 1-0 up from the right. He pulled into the middle and threw in from 18 meters. This half-time lead was flattering, however, because Bremen had played out the more promising goal approaches.
After an hour, central defender Niklas Süle, who had been transferred from FC Bayern, came into the Dortmund game for the first time in the Bundesliga. He replaced Mats Hummels and from then on played alongside Nico Schlotterbeck. The two should form the new BVB bulwark in the future, but what happened from the 89th minute could weigh on this duo for a while.
At the start of the game, the Bremen substitutes’ bench housed the three later match winners Buchanan, Schmid and Burke. The latter had already scored Bremen’s equalizer in the fifth minute of injury time in the 2-2 win against Stuttgart a week earlier. So you already knew such late cheers. Nevertheless, the coach Werner called the Werder miracle from Westphalia “irrational” because of its much larger extent.
“After the 1:2 hope germinated, after the 2:2 I was mentally thinking about protection, but after the 3:2 there was of course no holding back”, Werner recapitulated his emotions. The mood in the dressing room was just as exuberant as anyone could imagine. “The course of the game speaks for the morale of my team,” concluded Werner. The upcoming opponents will be careful not to check off games against Werder Bremen too early.