Should Borussia Dortmund Fans Be Worried About Marco Reus' Poor Form?
It sounds like a strange thing to say given his outstanding talent and obvious worth to the club, but Marco Reus is proving to be something of an unlucky charm for Borussia Dortmund right now.
After 11 wins in a row in all competitions this season—four of which Reus played in before he suffered his toe injury—the German international has returned to play in Dortmund’s last three games, none of which they have won.
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After being substituted before the hour mark in the Bundesliga draws with Hoffenheim and Darmstadt, Reus managed to complete the full 90 minutes in Thursday night’s 1-1 draw with PAOK Salonika in Greece, but he didn’t exactly impress.
Scoring him a 3/10 for his performance in the match, ESPN FC’s Stefan Buczko raised doubts over whether or not Dortmund’s star man will start the huge clash with Bayern Munich on Sunday, saying:
"After three lacklustre performances it's doubtful that Reus will start in Munich.
The talented midfielder started up front this time and seems to have lost all his mojo after a toe injury kept him out for three weeks.
Dortmund fans must be patient, as Reus will need more time to find back to his old self.
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Despite the negative review, it wasn’t just Reus who failed to set pulses alight in Salonika.
Buczko also scored the on-loan Adnan Januzaj a 3/10, stating that he “lacked sharpness”, while Henrikh Mkhitaryan earned a 4/10 as the reporter suggested he probably should have been rested for the match.
All of which is hardly confidence-building for Dortmund ahead of the trip to Munich to face the champions in Der Klassiker, but what will be uppermost in plenty of minds is the worrying form of Reus, who can be so devastating when he’s on his game.
In the home draw against Darmstadt last weekend, Buczko was again critical of the winger, scoring him a 2/10 for his performance and writing:
"Talk about a foreign object in Dortmund's system.
It's almost tragic how disconnected Reus looks after returning from injury. He was the least effective player on the field and almost every time he got the ball, he took a wrong turn and ran into a wall of defenders.
He was rightfully taken off after an hour.
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Will Thomas Tuchel risk him against Bayern then? Judging on this evidence, then probably not.
Reus, 26, needs time to get back to being the player we all know he can be, and that isn’t going to come overnight.
As we’ve seen with plenty of other top talents in world football, injury curses have a habit of striking at the worst-possible time and cutting down players in their prime. History is littered with heart-breaking stories, one of which Reus experienced when he missed the World Cup.
The worst thing that Tuchel could do would be to throw Reus into the action against Bayern when he’s clearly half-fit, and that was probably what the manager was thinking when he left his star man on the pitch for the full 90 minutes in Greece.
The draw leaves Dortmund on top of a Group C they really should be winning, and the hope has to be Reus will be fully up and running by the time they come to do so.
It will hurt him to be left out of a fixture as huge as the one which awaits this weekend, but, in the long run, it will surely be a decision which will benefit him and the club.
It’s only early October, there’s still so much time for those 2/10 and 3/10 performances to turn into 9/10 and 10/10s.
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