The season is over. In a year where a global pandemic stopped all football, we got time to appreciate what it means to watch this fantastic/infuriating team year in and year out. Dortmund finished the season in 2nd place 69 points. Our leading goal scorer and assist leader was Jadon Sancho with 17 goals and 16 assists.
Throughout the season we saw two different Dortmund squads. The squad who came out and played to the game plan perfectly, eviscerating any team in their wake and the squad who came out, had their gameplan fail, and got played of the field as they stood around without a clue. The season started with a win over Bayern Munich in the Supercup. After that Dortmund took the first round of the Pokal vs Uerdingen. then demolished Augsburg and Koln in the first two Bundesliga matches of the season. Our first warning flag was a loss to newly promoted Union Berlin. Nothing went our way that match but we all couldn’t possibly think that this team was gonna play like that often. We bounced right back in our next game against Leverkusen, hammering them 4-0. It was after this game the bad times started. Over the next moth BVB had 3 draws, two loses and a win. Drawing lesser teams like Frankfurt, Bremen and Freiburg made BVB far behind in the race for the title. They aren’t games a championship wining team should give up. Every single game was the same story. BVB would come out with a good gameplan, have the plan ruined then would be hopeless. We did manage to bounce back in the Hinrunde, getting a win vs Inter to get us to the group stage of UCL. We also lost to Bayern 4-0 and tied Paderborn 3-3. Overall the Hinrunde made it feel like Favre’s time at the club was over. The team looked out of their element too often and our title hopes vanished.
In the Ruckrunde we saw an entirely new BVB. We lost Paco Alcacer, but BVB picked up Salzburg striker Erling Haaland. Haaland immediately made a huge impact scoring 7 goals in his first 3 games. We saw some of the Hinrunde BVB vs Werder to get eliminated in the Pokal but generally went on a tear until the world football was put on hold. Our last pre-covid game was a disappointing exit to PSG in the UCL. After the Bundesliga restarted we looked red hot. We clowned our eternal rivals Schalke 4-0 in the first game back. We then won all but three of our games. 1 loss to Bayern where the ref had more of effect then the Bavarians, then two losses to Mainz and TSG where it didn’t look like we wanted to play at all.
So what went wrong and what went right this year? Continue reading