Lucien Favre’s reinvention of Dortmund will be built from the back: 3 things we learned
By Warren Pegg
Dortmund were held to a 0-0 draw away at Hannover on Friday. Here are three things we learned from the match.
Lucien Favre’s new-look Dortmund fought out an uneventful stalemate with Hannover in this week’s Friday night Bundesliga game. But what the match lacked in incident it made up for in clues about what we can expect from BVB over the coming months.
Dortmund’s rebirth will be built from the back
One of the biggest pre-season debates among Dortmund fans focused on whether Axel Witsel or Thomas Delaney would start in the BVB midfield. On the evidence of this match, the unexpected answer is, both.
It was understandable for Favre to pick the two defensive midfielders last week against an expensively assembled, high-pressing RB Leipzig side. But to do so again against lowly Hannover was both unanticipated and revealing.
This suggested that Favre’s immediate priority is to avoid a recurrence of the porous defense that cost Peter Bosz his job last season, an impression that was reinforced by other aspects of Dortmund’s line-up. They included the midfield being completed by Mo Dahoud, a much more defensive-minded player than Mario Goetze or Shinji Kagawa.
In addition, Jadon Sancho was overlooked in favor of Marius Wolf, whose role often seemed to be that of a defensive winger. Indeed, Wolf was so deep for periods of the first-halfirst halfsometimes looked like Dortmund were playing a four-man midfield. But despite his ineffectiveness going forward, Wolf remained on the pitch for the full 90 minutes.
And if Favre’s intention was to keep the game tight while relying upon Dortmund’s superior attacking talent to create the better chances, then his plan worked. You’d have been forgiven for forgetting that Hannover’s Niclas Füllkrug was the Bundesliga’s third-highest score last season. His side only had one chance of any note in the entire game – and that came from a corner late in the second half.
By contrast, Dortmund created two great chances for their best attacking player, Marco Reus, in the space of a few first-half minutes. Reus’ failure to convert those opportunities turned out to be the game’s defining moments.
Still, while Favre’s safety-first approach affords Dortmund a degree of control that they’ve often lacked during the past 12 months, it also makes for a drab spectacle. Indeed, the most exciting moment of the second half came when a spectator headed the ball back from the stands – and fell over a small child in the process:
https://twitter.com/FOXSoccer/status/1035626696760688640
Mario Goetze and Shinji Kagawa have their work cut out
There had been plenty of reports in Germany over the past week that Kagawa might even leave Dortmund before the end of the transfer window, with Sevilla his most commonly suggested destination. The Japan midfielder hasn’t even been included in Favre’s squads for either of BVB’s league games or the DFB Pokal cup match that kicked the season off.
Goetze has at least been on the bench for both of those Bundesliga games, but he didn’t make it onto the pitch in either. And although he started the cup match, he was the first Dortmund player to be taken off that night.
Moreover, in this game, when Favre substituted the player who had taken Goetze’s natural position in the starting line-up – Mo Dahoud – the coach chose to bring on Raphael Guerreiro instead.
It’s hard not to feel sympathy for Kagawa, who has clearly performed to a higher level than Goetze over the past two years.
In contrast, the stock of new signing Paco Alcacer has risen without the Spaniard even kicking a ball. Maximilian Philipp was ineffective throughout the Hannover game in an unfamiliar center-forward role – he managed just one touch in the Hannover penalty area over the course of the 90 minutes.
Given that the only other number 9 in the Dortmund squad is 18-year-old Alexander Isak, it seems likely that Alcacer will go straight into the starting line-up when he regains fitness.
Reports of Hannover’s demise are greatly exaggerated
Heading into this campaign, Hannover were tipped by many as being prime relegation candidates. But exactly the same things were said about them last season, only for Hannover to spend the first half of the campaign around the top of the table.
They lost three of their better players to Bundesliga rivals over the summer – Salif Sane, Felix Klaus and Martin Harnik to Schalke, Wolfsburg and Bremen respectively – but Hannover nonetheless seem to have retained the ability to drag teams down to their level.
And despite Hannover fielding four new signings against Dortmund, the game demonstrated that the club’s likable young coach Andre Breitenreiter, who was perhaps unfortunate not to be given longer than a year in charge at Schalke, will again field an obdurate, disciplined team.