Borussia Monchengladbach Look To Continue Revival Against Manchester City

Managerial departures in world football might be ten a penny, but every so often, there’s one that you didn’t see coming, that you can’t fathom, and you still struggle to believe it is real days, or even months, later.

Lucien Favre’s exit from Borussia Monchengladbach is one of those. Certainly, the team that finished last season third in the Bundesliga started this campaign pretty much as badly as possible, with five-straight league defeats and a Champions League hammering at Sevilla.

However, it never felt unfixable. A week before Favre quit his post, Gladbach’s director of sport Max Eberl went on ZDF’s Saturday night magazine programme Das aktuelle sportstudio to say that the coach’s status wasn’t even a subject for discussion.

The sense that Gladbach were close to an upswing in fortune is underlined by the fact that they go into their Champions League home debut, against Manchester City at Borussia Park on Wednesday, on the back of successive league victories (the reverse of the 2012 and 2014 Premier League champions’ form). That they will meet Manuel Pellegrini’s side minus Favre was not, however, part of the plan.

It was difficult not to feel sorry for the affable and honest Eberl as he talked the press through Favre’s decision (and it really was the coach’s call) last week. Eberl said he was “incredibly sad that he is no longer our manager,” as per the club’s official Twitter feed, and even struggled to adjust to the reality that the Swiss tactician actually had gone, as the tweet below underlines.

So instead of going head-to-head with Favre, whom many considered to be the Bundesliga’s outstanding coach last season, Pellegrini will have Andre Schubert as his opposite number in North Rhine-Westphalia on Wednesday night. Until just over a week ago, Schubert was looking after the club’s under-23 team.

It’s a fairly common progression in Germany, temporary or not, when there is a sudden departure from the hot seat. Thomas Schneider, Joachim Low’s current assistant, made the same step at Stuttgart in 2013, even if the move quickly went south. It’s a significant leap.

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So it’s to Schubert’s great credit that Gladbach emerged from the latest "Englische Woche" (English week), the phrase used in Germany to describe two Saturdays punctuated with an additional midweek league fixture—with two wins on the spin to take into battle against Pellegrini’s team.

After a resounding home win over Augsburg last Wednesday to garner their first points of the season, Schubert’s inherited side won at Stuttgart on Saturday afternoon to finally build some momentum and look, if not quite perfect, far closer to their old selves. Having scored just twice in their opening five games of the season, Die Fohlen have rattled in seven in two under the guidance of Schubert.

This, undoubtedly, will make the urbane Pellegrini sit up and take notice, although he is too canny to have written Gladbach off in the first place. Neither should one think that the Chilean boss not facing Favre is a let-off, given his tactical traumas in the Champions League. The early signs are that Schubert has a trick or two up his sleeve.

One of the new man’s key decisions in this area to date has been leaving centre-forward Josip Drmic—purchased in the summer—out of the starting line-up and replacing him by redeploying midfielder Lars Stindl further forward, in support of Raffael. In many ways, this makes better sense than leading the line with Drmic, and not only because the erstwhile Hannover captain netted 10 times in 20 starts for a freefalling side last season.

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Drmic, who scored regularly before a difficult sole campaign at Bayer Leverkusen last time out, is a poacher and remains an interesting option. His arrival to nominally replace Max Kruse (who joined Wolfsburg) represented something of a departure for Gladbach, with last season’s pair of Kruse and Raffael an unusual double act—they both liked to drop deep. From this perspective, Stindl is a better fit, at least while Gladbach seek to recover the old magic.

This new approach will also give City something to think about on Wednesday. They are hardly overburdened with pace at the back, and the potential of two deep-dropping forwards to pull the Premier League’s central defenders towards the halfway line could spell danger. Keeping the wily Raffael, who knows how to pick a pass set up three of the four first-half goals that blew Augsburg away, on a short leash will be key to City’s success or otherwise.

Gladbach often sat and soaked before counter-attacking at speed last season, tactics which undid both Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund (they took four league points from the mighty Bayern). It will not have escaped Gladbach’s notice that on City’s last visit to Germany, albeit only a pre-season friendly at Stuttgart, they were picked apart through fast breaks and from wide areas in an astonishing first half at the Mercedes-Benz Arena, as reported by Sky Sports. These are two zones in which the Gladbach that Favre built tend to excel.

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The space created by the forward pair saw the wide players break beyond them, and it’s good news for Gladbach that Patrick Hermann—perennially linked with Manchester United, as per Talksport—and Fabian Johnson have both returned to the line-up in these roles. The latter came back from a month out to net the opener against Augsburg.

Their returns from injury mark another distinct difference between the old regime and the nascent one. Simply, luck. The exits of Christoph Kramer and Kruse hurt, but they have been cruelly compounded by injuries. If defensive rock Martin Stranzl is still missing, Schubert has been able to call on Alvaro Dominguez in his two games to date, which Favre was unable to do.

The old coach left a real legacy, and his leaving should not obscure that. There is still stability at the club. Eberl extended his own deal to 2020 last week, days after Favre went, reinforcing that point. They have young talent throughout the squad, including stand-in captain Granit Xhaka (who scored the opener at Stuttgart), Thorgan Hazard and teenager Mo Dahoud, a supremely gifted midfielder who scored his first Bundesliga goal in the win over Augsburg.

The pressure, plainly, is all on City, with those Bundesliga wins finally allowing Gladbach space to enjoy their European adventure. That Favre’s intelligence lives on in his squad makes them dangerous novices to face for the visitors.