It felt like a regular, gentle Sunday morning in Brackel, the district to the east of the centre where Borussia Dortmund train. The reserve team trained and senior squad strikers Paco Alcácer and Erling Braut Haaland joined them, to get an extra few miles in their legs. Midfielder Julian Weigl, who recently joined Benfica, dropped in to say hello, bringing a gift of his shirt from his new club for his friend Axel Witsel, with the former now wearing the No 28 that the latter also wore in his own spell at Estádio da Luz nine years back.
Just as Weigl had gone from tempest to tranquillity, stepping out of his first Lisbon derby on Friday night, so had his old teammates. Their Sunday morning might have felt like a slightly jarring change of gear, but then again very little about Dortmund’s first game back after the Winterpause made sense.
Saturday’s return had seen Lucien Favre’s best-laid plans fly out of the window as Augsburg picked familiar holes in BVB, and their travelling fans were left to ask why it was all happening again? Why did their coach choose to go into the game with such an uneven back three of Lukasz Piszczek, Mats Hummels and Manuel Akanji, with their varying states of mobility, who ended up playing with about as much cohesion as a unit as those initial fears would suggest?
What they ended up with, 11 minutes into the second half and with Dortmund 3-1 down, was a back four as Haaland replaced Piszczek and any semblance of caution was thrown to the wind. Favre and company were busking it again, after the careless shelling of points from dominant positions in the final week before Christmas left them with plenty of work to do in 2020. It had all been worryingly familiar as they frittered chances aplenty – especially Marco Reus, with the skipper having an off day – while offering them back to the hosts with interest. Marco Richter’s arrow of a strike, the goal of the game which put Augsburg two-up just 19 seconds into the second half, showed that Martin Schmidt’s team weren’t necessarily in need of favours.
What they got afterwards, however, was a whirlwind. Haaland gatecrashed the Bundesliga just as he had done the Champions League with Salzburg back in September. One hundred and eighty-three seconds after coming on he opened his Dortmund account with a precise finish from Jadon Sancho’s pass. After a sublime equaliser from the Englishman there was more from his fellow teenager; a second tapped in after Thorgan Hazard took goalkeeper Tomas Koubek out of the picture, belatedly ratified after it was incorrectly flagged as offside in the first instance, and a third that was all his own, galloping from the halfway line after Reus’s pass released him and refusing to concede as the disobedient ball peeled back towards him off the pitch, carrying on to tuck a composed finish into the corner.
“I don’t think we’ve had that kind of striker since Robert Lewandowski,” Reus had told Sky during the club’s traditional winter training in Mallorca, a quote which had barely left his mouth before it was twisted into the club captain hailing the 19-year-old as the new Lewandowski, trimming off the inconvenience of Reus going on to elaborate on Haaland’s physical profile and out-and-out goalscoring instincts. All of a sudden nobody was arguing, whether they were surveying the quote’s true sentiment or the mischievously reinvented alternative.
The battle now was to find a way of framing such a feat. Haaland was already the second-youngest hat-trick scorer in the Bundesliga, and the first substitute to score three times in the competition. In terms of framing him in Dortmund iconography, he followed Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang in scoring a hat-trick on his debut which, unusually, the now-Arsenal striker also did at Augsburg, on the first day of the 2013-14 season. “If Haaland has the same success,” reflected Reus, “I’d sign up for that right now.”
It was left to the assembled media to gently tease the new hero over whether his fitness was good enough to start against Köln on Friday (“how did it look to you?” the Norwegian replied with an arch grin). Favre has played it smartly thus far with Haaland, recognising a rustiness in his game after a recent muscle injury, but even if he wanted to take it slowly with him, he may not have the option now.
Alcácer, the squad’s one authentic penalty-box presence beyond Haaland, could well be on his way out after a frustrating first half of the season, beset by fitness problems and in a situation now where trust has been gently eroded on both sides of the relationship – he has been frustrated not to play more, and the staff have not been satisfied enough with his efforts in training.
There are plenty of other things to think about. “If BVB want to play for the title,” wrote Ruhr Nachrichten’s Florian Groeger with some understatement, “they must get their defensive weaknesses under control as quickly as possible.” For now, though, it would seem rude not to simply bask in the glow of their new superhero.
The Guardian Sport
