On Friday afternoon, almost twenty hours after the knockout against Glasgow Rangers, Michael Zorc was barely able to hold himself back. “I’m shocked,” the BVB sports director tried to control his mood – and spoke Tacheles: “It was a disgrace. It was embarrassing to make such an appearance as Borussia Dortmund. Lame-ass football was the one you have to be ashamed of. “
Zorc, 59, has been in charge for a long time, but he’s probably never been so outraged about his own team. Maybe he did that because the 2:4 (0:2) defeat against the Scots in the first leg of the second round of the Europa League was nothing other than the continuation of a discouraging series of ups and downs for his Dortmund team.
Still sweaty from the game, immediately after the final whistle, felt team leader Mats Hummels had already let off steam. And in such well-chosen words and in the analysis so sharp that you noticed: Hummels has probably been turning and turning this comment on the sidelines in his head for weeks: “We play a lot of nonsensical, illogical football and make the opponent strong with it. We We often don’t want the easy solution,” the 33-year-old central defender lectured, ready to press but trembling with anger, “we often want to play far too complicated a game. We play too much complicated football here.”
The ups and downs seem to run like an endless red thread through the season: almost two weeks ago a 2:5 home debacle against Leverkusen, then the usual reparation with a convincing 3:0 at Union Berlin – and now one of those harsh ones again Setbacks that have been common at Dortmund for months. This time against a team from Glasgow, which is only average internationally, but benefited from BVB’s careless mistakes.
It’s been like this all season since Marco Rose took over the team from interim coach Edin Terzic last summer. It goes up and down like in a bouncy castle. With a strong second place as an interim balance in the Bundesliga (plus a reassuring lead over the competition) – and on the other hand: with the joyless elimination from the Champions League (including: 0: 4 against Ajax Amsterdam), with the embarrassing 2-1 loss in the DFB Cup at the second division team St. Pauli, and now with the next low blow in the – Attention! – Qualifying round for the round of 16 of the second division Europa League.
Zorc quotes Kahn: “If our players had balls, they would turn the thing around in Glasgow.”
The second most expensive team in Germany has already played twelve defeats this season, and many players are issued with a gifted certificate. But Hummels didn’t want to hear any more of that on this Thursday evening, which was rainy in every respect. Almost maliciously, he asked the reporter back: “Highly gifted? That includes many things: where to play which pass; to assess where risk is good and where risk is not good, in which areas you play. As I address it here, you can already see that none of this is one of our strengths.”
“We play a lot of nonsensical, illogical football and that makes our opponents strong.” – Mats Hummels after Dortmund’s embarrassing 4-2 in the Europa League against Glasgow.
(Photo: Jan Huebner/imago)
While Hummels quite truthfully wanted to narrow the problem down to “several positions” and not – as is usually the case with industry etiquette – to refer to everyone, Marco Rose also practiced certain self-criticism: “As a coach, I’m responsible for how the team performs. For that too , how the team implements it.” That honored Rose, but at the same time he had to admit the same helplessness in the matter that also crept up on license player boss Sebastian Kehl and sports director Zorc the day after: “If I had an explanation now,” admitted Rose, “I would go in immediately run the dressing room and announce it there.”
The extremely noticeable fluctuations in Dortmund’s performance may be partly due to Rose’s rigid, offensive tactical ideas, which probably don’t quite fit the real BVB squad. But Zorc wanted to criticize the players in particular: “The floodlights are on, you’re playing the European Cup against a well-known opponent like Glasgow Rangers – what do you actually expect as a player to finally move your ass?” He scolded on Friday . With a view to the second leg next Thursday in Scotland, Zorc even borrowed a famous quote from today’s FC Bayern boss Oliver Kahn: “If our players had balls, they would turn things around in Glasgow.”
BVB captain Marco Reus wanted to put the word “mentality” on the index months ago as an explanation for the inexplicable. However, his boss Zorc has seen it differently since Thursday evening at the latest: “We have to attribute these emerging mentality debates to ourselves,” says the sports director.
Whether the mental anatomy in the Borussia squad is sufficient for Zorc’s desire for “more balls” is difficult to predict in view of the amplitudes in the Dortmund season. First of all, Rose and his beat-up squad will continue in the next league home game against Borussia Mönchengladbach on Sunday. So just against the opponent, where BVB had torn the head coach Rose from the coaching chair in spring 2021 with a fee of five million (based on an exit clause). It is therefore humanly understandable that Rose has not yet received much criticism at BVB, despite the fickle performance and being eliminated from all possible competitions.
Sebastian Kehl was at least a touch optimistic on Friday: “That was an embarrassing performance. But now we’re playing against Gladbach. And why shouldn’t we win in Glasgow with a two-goal difference and go into extra time – if we’re completely different there …” What else is there to do besides keep going?