Borussia Dortmund: Addressing Darmstadt Match

In the aftermath of the embarrassing defeat to bottom of the table Darmstadt, come along with my in the journey to cope with it.

Because I was out of town for the weekend, I just got around to watching the Borussia Dortmund match against Darmstadt. By now all of my readers have likely read all the pieces about the wonky tactics and poor performances that led to the horrible loss of points.

Believe me, after watching the match late last night I was full of the crushing disappointment that many of you felt. Darmstadt had won fewer matches all season than BVB win in a typical month. How did this happen? What does this mean for Thomas Tuchel’s time with the club?

I spent the night thinking about the match. I wanted to fully digest the unorganized haphazard display that just unfolded before my eyes. Why did the backline look like a bunch of U-10s when they were scrimmaging against the U-12s in practice. Darmstadt while not totally dominating the match, it certainly seemed like it at many points.

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The more thinking I did the more I came to rationalize the match. As an American who enjoys both the NBA and College Football (American football) there is something called a schedule loss.

In the NBA, there are often crazy travel/actual game scheduling quirks during the season. Teams are frequently scheduled to play five games in six nights with travel included or some similar seemingly crazy combination. During the end of those long stretches, teams often rest the older players, but more importantly to this Borussia Dortmund conversation, you can see those that do play are simply not engaged mentally. Possibly because they are exhausted physically.

In American college football, there are different schedule losses or games that are called look-ahead games. Every year big teams will lose to very average teams simply because the schedule falls unfavorably. Ohio State usually plays a few very big games every year. The last game is always against the big rival Michigan and two weeks before that the match occasionally is against a strong team as well. For young men who are typically 18-22 years old, no matter their athletic ability the emotional toll the sandwiching the big games around a horrible opponent can take away from the actual game against the horrible opponent. It happens all the time in American college football. Week to week these youngsters can’t be fully engaged when such huge games are before and after a poor team.

It is my belief that is what happened to Borussia Dortmund. Sure they were physically engaged most of the time. Many players put in the needed tackles, ran the hard yards. However, the club, particularly the backline just didn’t look mentally engaged. The same symptoms that are found in the NBA losses were present. Lack of organization, players out of position, and lack of basic communication. In so many instances the easy cutting through ball that Darmstadt played opened up a defense that didn’t know players were even there, let alone had the ability to make a tackle.

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The classic NBA problem of too many games so closely, combined with the American college football look ahead and coming off a big match is how I began to rationalize the loss. Coming off playing an emotional 120-minute shootout win just days before and with a huge Champions League match against Benfica upcoming it is no wonder that the Darmstadt match was a loss.

Only the best managers/coaches have the ability to mentally focus their squad and motivate them to push through these difficult circumstances. There is no question that Thomas Tuchel isn’t a top manager world wide. He is very good and has done a great deal of positive work at Borussia Dortmund, but it is clear he can’t overcome the hump that was presented over this weekend. Unless there is a manager at Borussia Dortmund who can do that, you can forget about winning the Bundesliga.

Ultimately though this match has to be kept in context. The schedule loss is one reason. The odds of winning regardless of starting eleven or tactics used was lower than many imagined based simply on the circumstances. Another reason is Borussia Dortmund are still in a position to make a top four spot. For months we knew that the club wasn’t going to win the league so as long as enough points are collected to finish top four a bad loss here and there is fine.

I’ll conclude with this one sentence. I would rather have a horribly disengaged match from Borussia Dortmund in an ordinary Bundesliga match than in the Champions League or DFB-Pokal Cup match.

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