Reus wasn't even remotely close to 100% imo, I didn't understand why Klopp played him against a 3rd league team when Hofmann had a decent pre season and since he was somewhat poor against them I thought it an even bigger mistake to let him start against Leverkusen (yes - cpt Hindsight reporting in).
Well, my best guess is that Klopp wants to bring Reus back into top shape as quick as possible by giving him competive game time. This is of course a riskier approach as just by training, but it can speed up the process. On top of that even a Reus without top form can still kick very dangerous set pieces, which became a weapon for us more and more in recent years.
I was in the stadium yesterday to kick off the Bundesliga season. I expected a hard game beforehand, because Leverkusen was one of the dangerous teams we could have faced at this point. A team with a good amount of quality in the team, especially the starting XI, which they also could field bar one exception (Lars Bender) and a small amount of WC players, resulting into a rather comfortable pre season for them. We on the other hand were missing our four best build up players (Hummels, Gündogan, Sahin, Kirch) and had no forward alternatives on the bench to throw in because of injuries.
Leverkusen had the best start they could hope for, catching us off guard in the matter of seconds and putting us on the back foot. This played right into Schmidt´s cards who then set up his team to do two things: destroy our offensive play right from the beginning and drive the occasional counter.
They swarmed our central midfield with hard pressing, which impressed some people, but I was not among them. Their energy and work rate were impressive, but overall I thought that their execution was off several times. It was too focused on the ball, which opened up space, which we failed to capitalize on. Very often they also came simply too late and instead for letting up they went for the legs instead of the ball. In that sense this type of pressing is clearly dependent on the leniency of the referee. Ref Aytekin has the reputation of being shy to give out bookings and maybe Coach Schmidt took that into consideration, but when none of the seven tactical fouls get punished you grow frustrated with the ref. With a more strict ref the whole midfield of Leverkusen would have been booked by half time. In total they picked up 28 fouls in the game, which is a staggering number given that the leagues average is somewhere between 30 to 32 for both teams.
I don´t want to put too much on the ref, though, because we clearly did not deserve to win the game. We lacked organisation and precision in our game, especially with the final pass. We did not deserve to lose it either, because we were the better team in the second half. A draw would have been the fairest result, but football is not always fair.
My biggest revelation of the weekend did not come in the stadium, but on the train ride back. Next time I take a good book with me instead of surfing the net with a smart phone. According to several Dortmund "supporter" on the internet, we will need a miracle to place top 4 at the end of the season, all of our summer transfers are trash and too expensive (this includes the Ginter transfer, which was an absolute steal), Klopp has lost his touch with the team and the ideology of our football and DoF Zorc needs to go no questions asked. Its kinda sad when you grow disgusted with parts of your own fanbase and don´t find any motivation anymore to post on boards, where you spend hours of rich discussions only a few years ago. Appearantly success does have a price.
Well played sir!
