By catching up in Frankfurt, Borussia Dortmund refutes allegations that its team lacks the right attitude. Nevertheless, ambivalent feelings remain after the 3: 2 – because the error rate is high.
Highly entertaining: In the final phase between Dortmund and Frankfurt, Erling Haaland (center) and Martin Hinteregger (left) have a kind of saloon fight – afterwards the referee distributes yellow cards.
The once important film genre of the western has gone out of style in recent years. The rare productions that still exist only reach a small audience. But there is still football, which on some days shares a few essential motifs with stories about cowboys, saloons and gunslingers.
Mats Hummels spoke directly of “Wild West Football” when his Dortmund team survived a new adventure on Saturday. However, the defender’s feelings were ambivalent after the 3-2 win at Eintracht Frankfurt. “We achieved a great victory,” said Hummels, describing this working day as “quite exhausting”.
Well-known mistakes
The winter break wasn’t even three weeks long, but the protagonists of the Dortmund soccer project had secretly hoped that they would leave some problems from the first half of the year behind. For example, the fatal tendency to invite opponents with easily avoidable mistakes to score goals. But as in the film, in which the western heroes do not allow themselves to be transformed into serious citizens by appeals to reason, the Dortmunders made those mistakes that they later had to correct in an imposing showdown.
They were 2-0 down by the 70th minute before Thorgan Hazard, Jude Bellingham and Mahmoud Dahoud scored a memorable win with their goals. Hardly anyone believed BVB would make such a turnaround, said Emre Can, “but we believed in ourselves”.
Even a kind of saloon fight between Dortmund’s Erling Haaland and Frankfurt’s Martin Hinteregger had taken place after the goal to make it 2-2. There were obscene gestures and insults, friends of crude action scenes were well entertained. Dortmund coach Marco Rose was happy about an “emotional game” that touched upon old longings in the atmospheric cosmos of the black and yellow football community.
Such dramas, which often end well, have been part of the brand essence of BVB since the coach Jürgen Klopp revived this almost insolvent company a good decade ago. “Full throttle” and “adrenaline” were key terms at the time; to put it simply, BVB was the counter-model to the Bavarians who acted with cool perfection. The hope of being able to build on this time is associated with the coach Rose, and this is beginning to succeed. The Frankfurters were in any case great in the final phase, “we were like rabbits in front of the queue,” said the Eintracht coach Oliver Glasner, “and unfortunately the snake has bitten.”
Even if there are still games with somewhat dull phases in which critics unearthed the old accusation of BVB’s mentality problem, progress can be seen at this point. “The attitude was there today,” said Rose, “we can take away from the game that it is worthwhile to stick to yourself.”
In the field of avoiding mistakes, which has been intensively worked on since the beginning of the season, the coach and his team hardly make any progress. In December, many of the high-scoring games were lost, the gap to FC Bayern increased to nine points. “It’s too easy to find spaces against us,” Rose complained once again, adding a high error rate in the build-up of the game and weaknesses in defending against set pieces.
High risk tolerance
On the other hand, Dortmund contribute a good part to the willingness to take risks, which is currently noticeably widespread in the Bundesliga, which makes many games highly attractive. And after Bayern’s defeat against Mönchengladbach on Friday there is even a chance that the title race will be interesting again. The record champions’ lead has shrunk to six points.
“We always talk about Bayern, but we have to look at ourselves,” said Emre Can when considering such considerations. But in secret, the Dortmunders should keep calculating their chances of winning the big coup – just like any real western hero would do.