Too Early for Crisis Talk but Borussia Dortmund Need More from Thomas Tuchel

A few weeks ago, one sensed, it could have been a walkover, regardless of cliches about derbies not respecting status or form. Borussia Dortmund had begun the campaign with swagger, while local rivals Schalke—supposedly at a bright new dawn under new coach Markus Weinzierl and sporting director Christian Heidel—had opened the campaign with five straight Bundesliga defeats.

Yet the gap has closed more recently, with Weinzierl stabilising Schalke and Dortmund stalling ahead of Saturday’s Revierderby, the 89th meeting between the pair in the Bundesliga. That was reflected in an intense but ultimately frustrating afternoon for Die Schwarzgelben, with another game wading through treacle capped off by seeing Weinzierl’s players celebrating on their pitch at the end, almost as if they’d won the game.

“It feels like s--t,” said Mario Gotze after the match (as per the Guardian’s Raphael Honigstein), and he was speaking for the whole Dortmund camp. They had been tame before the break, Schalke containing them with ease, and having a couple of good chances themselves.

Yet even if Thomas Tuchel told television reporters after the match that “I had the feeling we were very close to winning in the second half” and that he had been “very satisfied” with his team after the interval, nobody could say Dortmund were robbed. It had been too little, too late, in the image of the previous home league game against Hertha Berlin.

As he strived to vocalise what the missing ingredient was, the coach was pondering a now-familiar problem. The quality is there and has been for most of the season, with the depth of Dortmund’s squad particularly evident in the Champions League win over Sporting Clube de Portugal, when the locals in Lisbon marvelled at the strength of a team with 10 on their treatment table.

Yet as they showed in Portugal, and again on their own patch at the weekend, having the talent is one thing, and fitting it into a functioning, consistent unit is something else altogether. In fits and starts, Dortmund have been exhilarating, especially when teenagers Ousmane Dembele and Christian Pulisic have led the way. Finding the definitive performance, a match de reference, as they say in France, has proved a little trickier.

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As they seek to seal a return to the Champions League knockout rounds with victory over Sporting in the return this week, it is time that Dortmund managed to do so. The first game yielded the right result, but only just, encapsulating many of Tuchel’s problems in short form. His side scored two sublime goals via Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Julian Weigl, and had the chances to kill the game stone dead before the break. They didn’t take them, and almost ended up letting the contest slip through their fingers.

Sporting are dealing with their own difficulties, also coming into the match on a run of three straight draws which has seen them fall off the title pace set by Benfica. Jorge Jesus’ side trail their neighbours by seven points (one less than the current Bayern-Dortmund gap), and both coach and players were the target of angry fans after the uninspiring goalless draw at Nacional this weekend, as reported by Record (in Portuguese).

In short, Dortmund have the opportunity to grab the bull by the horns. The question is if they can find the application to do so. The club’s transfer window was a daring one, with cornerstones Mats Hummels, Ilkay Gundogan and Henrikh Mkhitaryan going and an influx of fine young talent brought in, including the aforementioned Dembele and Euro 2016 winner Raphael Guerreiro.

There was experience too, with Gotze returning home, and Andre Schurrle joining up. Yet their struggles for form, consistency and (in the case of the latter) fitness have mirrored Dortmund’s difficulty in finding true rhythm. At the same point last season, Tuchel’s team were in second place in the Bundesliga with 20 points on the board, despite having suffered a 5-1 humbling at Bayern Munich.

So while the easy analysis is that unevenness and inconsistency always had to be expected at the start of this season given the youth of the squad, some light really has to be shone on the role of the more experienced players. While Gotze gave a promising display in the second half against Schalke, sparking hopes of a revival, Shinji Kagawa was again quiet.

The pair had both been missing in action away at Sporting, leaving a hole in the middle of Dortmund’s midfield that more injuries to Tuchel’s defenders (namely Marc Bartra and Matthias Ginter) left the coach unable to plug, and which almost turned the game. Kagawa’s often indifferent displays since his return to Westfalen have even led to suggestions (as reported here by ESPN FC’s John Duerden) that he might be ready, at 27, to return to Japan.

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Tuchel is not exempt from analysis either, as he attempts to juggle parallel Bundesliga and Champions League challenges for the first time. One of Dortmund’s hallmarks last season was a tactical versatility, as they managed to alternately press high, then sit off, or keep ball at a lower tempo to conserve energy.

They have not been as comfortable switching systems this season (at least partly due to the high turnover of playing staff), and a couple of Tuchel’s tactical experiments, like the 3-4-3 that ended in defeat at Leverkusen, have fallen flat.  

Now a big week lies ahead as Dortmund try to rediscover their personality. Champions League qualification would be welcome, of course, but arguably the week’s real pressure point is Saturday’s trip to Hamburg. HSV are in a terrible state—on their second coach of the season already, but Markus Gisdol looks no more able to inject life into a moribund squad than his predecessor Bruno Labbadia did.

Hamburg are bottom of the table, with just two points from nine matches and having registered only two goals in that time. The man who scored them both, Bobby Wood, is banned for the visit of Dortmund after being sent off in Sunday’s defeat at Koln.

Yet they are also BVB’s bogey team. They haven’t won at the Volksparkstadion since January 2012, when they were en route to their last title under Jurgen Klopp. Hamburg have also won twice at Westfalen in the Bundesliga since then.

It’s too early to talk of a crisis, of course, but the exciting make-up of this squad (and the crash-bang-wallop of the Klopp era) means there is an expectation for Dortmund to grab you by the throat, which they aren’t doing at the moment. For Tuchel and his team, it’s high time they recovered the zest of their best.