Marco Reus actually seemed quite happy when he said: “That wasn’t our best performance of the season.” Marco Rose sounded pretty satisfied when he admitted: “It wasn’t a spectacle.” And Mats Hummels even drew a positive conclusion when he said: “You don’t always have to do magic.”
All three of them were right. In the 1-0 (1-0) win in the second Champions League group game against Sporting Lisbon, Borussia Dortmund did not show their best performance of the season, did not perform any spectacle and did not perform magic. Only: Of course, none of this was on purpose.
In the end they only praised their good organization and reliable counter-pressing. The latter, the recapture of the ball after losing the ball, was of course only necessary in this intensity because so many balls were lost against cleverly defending Portuguese. The Dortmund team was sidelined seven times, and three times they were denied hits because of this. “To zero is an important factor,” said coach Rose, “we haven’t played to zero since the cup game in Wiesbaden.”
“We’re noticing that we have to reinvent ourselves a bit up front,” said coach Rose
That was almost two months ago. Eight competitive games with at least one goal conceded and a total of 16 goals had sometimes brought the team and their coach close to despair. So this time the relief was all the greater. Sporting, of course, who had already lost their opening game at home to Ajax Amsterdam with 1: 5, was offensive quite unimaginative. The men from Lisbon had “Superbock” written on their left jersey sleeve, but this supposed gigantic lust turned out to be a profane advertisement for Portuguese beer.
Because Erling Haaland failed because of muscular problems like in the 1-0 defeat in the Bundesliga against Gladbach, the Dortmund offensive game suffered again from force and effectiveness. The ball rolled around the penalty area too awkwardly, too few spaces were torn open and used. “We’re noticing that we have to reinvent ourselves a bit at the moment,” said the coach Rose afterwards, and that was unfortunately a subtly formulated admission that this team is actually getting far too little forward without Haaland.
But only actually. Because they still scored the one important goal for the minimal win, and for this purpose it happened that the entry from PSV Eindhoven, the 22-year-old striker Donyell Malen, finally scored his first goal in his tenth competitive game for Dortmund and with it also his first scorer point, because he had not even succeeded in a template before. “Donny was already thinking about it,” said Rose. BVB Malen had cost 30 million, and for 30 million you don’t want to see a striker who is not involved in a single goal for eight hours and 42 minutes.
But that’s how it was with painting. For 522 minutes he looked for the connection to the Dortmund game, and if he didn’t really find it on Tuesday evening, he was at least granted in the 37th minute, the best, really fast and precise attack of the Borussia for the golden goal to utilize. Jude Bellingham took a pass from center-back Manuel Akanji, who was just behind the center line, into the center in front of the opponent’s penalty area, only to quickly play it steeply into the penalty area with the second contact. He ran a few steps with the ball on the right hand side of the penalty area and pushed it out of the barrel, diagonally flat, and into the bottom left of the goal. That was done very well.
Donyell Malen will be particularly motivated for the top meeting in the Amsterdam Arena
After 522 minutes of competitive play in the Dortmund jersey, Haaland already had twelve hits at the beginning of 2020, but comparisons with an extraterrestrial do not help a down-to-earth striker like Malen either. Next Saturday against FC Augsburg, the Dutchman will try to match his first goal with the second. And he will be particularly motivated when his Dortmund team will play the third Champions League group game at Ajax Amsterdam on October 19.
In the Amsterdam Arena, where the two six-point teams play for the group autumn championship that Tuesday, Malen usually plays international matches with Oranje. On October 19th he will want to show the Dutch audience how far he is at BVB. But for that he should definitely go one step further. Ideally, he would then show his best performance of the season, put on a spectacle and do some magic. Nobody would get upset about that.