Bundesliga
Stability: BVB defends itself to catch up
BVB coach Edin Terzic was happy about his team’s victory. photo
© Rolf Vennenbernd/dpa
If they were six points behind a Champions League place, Borussia Dortmund would normally have been called out for attack. Now the motto is: defend well. Also against relegation candidates.
What a fruitless art magic football can be Edin Terzic was only seen again shortly before the 4-0 win at 1. FC Köln.
In the training game, Donyell Malen scored “an outstanding overhead kick goal,” said the Borussia Dortmund coach after the win at the start of the second half of the season: “But in the end his team lost 3-1. And his goal had no weight.”
It is examples like these that Terzic is currently showing his players again and again in order to moderate his paradigm shift, which at first glance seems so unpopular. Stability instead of spectacle, defensive passion instead of magical football – the soccer runner-up has now internalized this way of thinking. BVB, whose offensive, spectacular football is actually anchored in their DNA, suddenly wins games on defense. This was also the case with the penultimate match in Cologne and a week earlier in the 3-0 win at bottom team Darmstadt – even if the clear results after late goals incorrectly point to the offensive elemental power of days gone by.
“Less sexy, more success,” Terzic had already proclaimed this motto in the fall. And it wasn’t just due to the situation, it has permanently become BVB’s dogma. “This stability, the compactness, allowing little – that will be the way for the future,” confirmed sports director Sebastian Kehl on Saturday. “You can lose balls,” says Terzic, “but you can’t lose your game.”
Annoyed BVB keeper
Goalkeeper Gregor Kobel even gets a bit too much of a good thing every now and then. “Sometimes it annoys me a bit because everyone is doing gymnastics in front of my face and I can’t see that much,” said the Swiss with a laugh. But with two games in the new year and no goals conceded, Kobel is of course happy. At Christmas, BVB only conceded three goals less than Cologne, who were in acute danger of relegation.
“We conceded enough goals in the first half,” said Kehl: “So that was of course an issue that we wanted to work on.” The whole thing takes some getting used to when BVB simply leaves the entire game to harmless Cologne players. If nine field players in the game act at the penultimate position a maximum of 30 meters in front of their own goal. In the end, the statistics even showed 19:11 shots on goal for FC and 13:4 from corners. But Dortmund currently doesn’t care much about such number games. They are cheaply priced in.
“It’s about the value of your own goal,” Terzic made clear: “We want to protect that as a team. We want to throw everything into it.” There have already been approaches, but “it’s about showing this consistently without fluctuations on every match day.”
And the success proves Terzic right. The road to the Champions League, which seemed so long before the start of the year just over a week ago, has become much shorter faster than hoped. After Stuttgart and Leipzig lost both games of the year, Dortmund is only one point behind third place.
If the structure works, the staff is also easier to replace. Defense chief Mats Hummels and Emre Can were missing in Cologne, and Niklas Süle had to leave the field during the break with back problems. But 19-year-old Hendry Blank from the 2nd team fit in perfectly. Winter loanee Ian Maatsen said it felt “as if I had been playing with my colleagues for years”.