Raphael Honisgstein on Dortmund under Thomas Tuchel:
Chances spurned, shots mis-hit, final passes astray. The first half was playing out like countless other
Borussia Dortmund league games in recent memory and anybody knowing anything at all about football knew what was coming next. One swift, devastating Ingolstadt counter-attack, or a goal from a corner, or a deflected shot, and then: a nagging, avoidable, hugely unnerving away defeat to one of the weakest teams in the Bundesliga.
This season’s Dortmund, however, are doing things differently. Ten minutes into the second half at the Audi-Sportpark, their makeshift right-back, Matthias Ginter, unexpectedly cut inside on his left foot and placed a low shot past the Ingolstadt goalkeeper Orjan Nyland. Marco Reus doubled the lead from the penalty spot on the hour mark.
The rest was a gentle stroll to the second 4-0 win in Thomas Tuchel’s second
Bundesliga match on the BVB bench (with goals from Shinji Kagawa and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang) and to first spot in the table. The last time the club had enjoyed that position was two years ago. “It’s a nice picture and I don’t mind if it stayed like that forever,” Tuchel said about the view from the top.
He praised his team’s work ethic but was more impressed that they had managed to skip their inner stylus from the well-worn groove of yesterday’s ballads and onto the next track: a more uplifting, feelgood tune.
“I’m especially pleased that in the second half,” he said, “we managed to liberate ourselves from the dissatisfaction and frustration, from the self-fulfilling prophecy of thinking ‘if you don’t score, you’ll concede at some point’, and that we totally stayed focused on our task of doing what we were intending to do on the pitch”.
Sitting next to him on the press conference podium, the Ingolstadt coach Ralph Hasenhüttl seemed just as impressed. “It was an interesting experience for us today,” said the manager of the Bavarian Bundesliga debutants. “We won’t have seen Dortmund’s last win in the league today”.
That much is certain. Within the space of six consecutive wins in as many competitive games, Tuchel has built up so much positive momentum that the away supporters in Ingolstadt were singing lustily about their team winning the title and the captain Mats Hummels had to field questions about the
Meisterschaft.
“It’s been a promising start but it would be too early to cultivate any sort of hopes,” said the centre-back, who had admitted to comfort-eating during last year’s hellish campaign. It is unclear how much of an impact Tuchel’s ban on long-standing, much-loved pizza and pasta deliveries to the Dortmund training ground by a local restaurateur have had on the team’s fresh appetite for destruction – Tuchel has stopped eating carbohydrates altogether – but to the naked eye, Dortmund look as lean and mean as they did at the peak of their powers in 2012.
A new dietary regime, a new fitness coach and a new – or perhaps renewed – attention to small details on the pitch have all played their part in restoring the club to their position as the second super-power in German football.
Tuchel has been irritated by some of the media attention on mundane matters like the fact that he coaches players on the positioning of their feet or puts out the cones for some of the complex exercises himself – “Maybe nobody had watched the training at Mainz before,” he wondered – but Dortmund had been in desperate need of these kind of small but important readjustments after seven years under Jürgen Klopp. For all the club’s bad luck with injuries and poor finishing, the set-up had outlived itself.
Tuchel is reluctant to speak about change and evolution because these terms imply progress, thereby denigrating the previous regime. “Kloppo has taken the team to where they are now, and now there’s a new coach. That’s it,” he said. “I get angry when comparisons are made. Kloppo said it in his farewell speech: don’t make comparisons because they diminish the new or the old, depending on results”.
There’s no question, however, that Tuchel has taken the Klopp blueprint –strong pressing, counter-pressing, constant movement, many high-tempo sprints – and given it an extra dimension, courtesy of better possession play. Whereas the new breed of German coaches focus on playing “against the ball”, Tuchel – an avowed Pep Guardiola fan – wants complete domination with and without the ball.
He has described Guardiola’s Barça as the “non-plus-ultra” and spent two evenings talking football with the Catalan coach in a bar and restaurant in Munich. Eye witnesses claim that the duo requisitioned extra salt and pepper mills from other tables. Tuchel sees a more patient, controlled buildup as a necessary measure to allow rest periods on the ball and also as the key to succeed against defensive sides. Klopp’s up and down madness has begun to give way to a more varied tempo, with pace being built up in the final third, through positional switches and direct combinations.
Tuchel has been helped in his task by Dortmund coming through the transfer window unscathed so far. Qualification for the Europa League, a competition that will generate plenty of income and could well yield a trophy, has enabled the club to keep all their best players for the first time since they won the league in 2011.
Ilkay Gündogan is coming back to his best. Henrikh Mkhitaryan, a perennial under-performer under Klopp relative to his amazing skill-set, has been superb so far. Even Ginter, who had been banished to the BVB amateurs before, is showing glimpses of the qualities that made him a €10m player. A deep, multi-talented squad and one of the most driven, smartest coaches in the business: It was always going to work. But this early, this well? Dortmund are destined for great things again and the Bundesliga will be all the better for it.
. Typical game, Dortmund totally dominant in the first half but fail to score. Ingolstadt look like the better team and actually create chances in the 2nd and then concede twice within a few minutes to kill the game. Obviously deserved lead for Dortmund though.