Midfield Issues, Schoolboy Defending Sink Borussia Dortmund at Frankfurt

Borussia Dortmund's stint as veritable contenders for the Bundesliga title in the 2016/17 season lasted all of seven days.

Their 1-0 win over Bayern Munich on the previous matchday had been considered a statement victory. Not only did they finally beat the Bavarians in a meaningful league match for the first time since 2012, but they showed they have the necessary flexibility to win matches while forgoing most of the principles of their play, focusing on pressure and defending rather than the possession game.

Seven days and a thoroughly deserved 2-1 defeat at the hands of Eintracht Frankfurt later, they are nine points behind league leaders RB Leipzig and dropped back to six behind Bayern.

Sitting only seventh in the table, also behind teams such as Frankfurt, Cologne, Hoffenheim, the Black and Yellows have their work cut out for them just to make the UEFA Champions League next season.

Title talk can once and for all be put to the rest for this campaign. There was never much of a chance of the Ruhr side competing for the championship given the many new faces head coach Thomas Tuchel had to integrate in his squad, but what little chance there was now has to be considered gone.

That is how bad Dortmund were at Frankfurt on Saturday.

PATRIK STOLLARZ/Getty Images

The 43-year-old rightfully laid into his team in his post-match press conference, saying: "Technically, tactically, mentally—and complemented by willingness. Our performance as a whole was deficient. It began during training this week, and today it was a performance from the first to the last minute that merited no points."

The former Mainz boss looked increasingly frustrated on the sideline as the game wore on, with microphones on the touchline picking up his commands that turned from shouts to yells.

In his exasperation over his team's performance, Tuchel even went out of character and made all three changes in one go with more than 30 minutes of play left—the storied club's first-ever triple substitution in the German top flight, per the Bundesliga on Twitter.

He probably would have made seven or eight changes had he been allowed to do so, with only two or three players hitting their normal form. 

Dortmund were especially bad in midfield, where Julian Weigl had what could well have been his worst game since coming to Westfalenstadion in the summer of 2015.

Already without a creative central midfielder because of Raphael Guerreiro's injury, the Black and Yellows needed more from their principal buildup player, whose numbers—64 touches in 57 minutes and 87.7 per cent pass-completion rate, per WhoScored.com—look decent but fail to tell the correct story.

Team-mates left the 21-year-old out to dry, however, with Mario Gotze and Gonzalo Castro disappearing for most of the game. The former followed up his arguably best performance for Dortmund against previous club Bayern with perhaps his worst.

A player of Gotze's calibre should be able to take the reins in a match in which his team-mates are struggling to move the ball forward with any purpose, but he went down with the rest of the team.

Dortmund's passing map, provided by tactics blogger 11tegen11 on Twitter, shows how there was no link between the team's defensive and offensive structures, which resulted in an alignment without any real presence in the middle of the park:

A lot of the credit for Dortmund's problems in midfield belongs to Frankfurt, of course. One of the surprise teams of the Bundesliga after narrowly escaping relegation last season, Niko Kovac's side impressed with excellent organisation and tactical flexibility, switching between three-, four- and five-man defences throughout the 90 minutes.

That said, Tuchel's men still had enough opportunities to win the match. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang was close to scoring an incredible goal in the first half, when he "flicked the ball over a Frankfurt defender to have a clear sight of Lukas Hradecky's goal but drove his shot just wide," as ESPN FC's Stefan Buczko described it.

Michael Probst/Associated Press

The Gabonese later scored a momentary equaliser after brilliant work from substitute Ousmane Dembele, far and away the Black and Yellows' best player on the day. The 19-year-old almost saved his team with a fantastic curler in stoppage time, only for it to clang off the crossbar.

It was that kind of day for the Ruhr side, who were also denied a blatant penalty when Marco Reus was held by David Abraham in the box and had another appeal in stoppage time waved off, which looked to be a better call from referee Wolfgang Stark.

Quite frankly, though, Dortmund did not deserve to come away from Frankfurt with a point or more.

A team that concedes more or less straight from kick-offs twice in a game deserves nothing but a defeat and a miserable ride home.

Fifteen seconds were all it took Frankfurt to score in the second half, with Szabolcs Huszti punishing Dortmund's somnolence out of the break. "Judging by the way we left the changing room, I would have been astounded if we had not conceded one," Tuchel said in his post-match remarks. 

A positioning error by team captain Marcel Schmelzer, of all people, allowed Timothy Chandler to play a simple cutback pass into the path of Huszti, with no BVB midfielder picking up the Hungarian's run through a central channel into the box, as can be observed from the 41-second mark in the video below:

Frankfurt are not a team against whom you want to chase a goal, seeing as they are so well-organised and have excellent centre-backs in Abraham and Real Madrid loanee Jesus Vallejo. When Dortmund finally did find the equaliser, it took them less than a minute to throw it all away again.

This time, Sebastian Rode forced team-mate Matthias Ginter into a pass that was promptly intercepted. Lukasz Piszczek failed to close down Huszti, who laid off to Haris Seferovic, who slotted home from range.

Not only was it the second goal that came quickly after kick-off for Frankfurt, but it was also the second time this season that Dortmund conceded right after scoring themselves—it also happened in the disappointing 3-3 draw at Ingolstadt.

This writer lamented the Black and Yellows' dropping intensity levels in second halves this season in a previous piece, but it has never been as glaring as it was against Frankfurt. Dortmund have conceded 11 of their 14 league goals against in the second 45 minutes of games, an unacceptable rate that puts their focus and attitude into question.

Fans will not feel overly confident in the team's defence at the moment, especially with back-up goalkeeper Roman Weidenfeller replacing the injured Roman Burki until the winter break.

Martin Meissner/Associated Press

The veteran German has conceded six goals against Legia Warsaw and Frankfurt despite Dortmund allowing only seven and four shots on target in those two games, per WhoScored.com. Weidenfeller only got a palm on Seferovic's shot, an attempt Burki would perhaps have saved.

If there is a silver lining for the Ruhr side, it is that they finally have a full week of training to work on their deficiencies before facing struggling Borussia Monchengladbach on home turf on Matchday 13. Factoring in international breaks, it is the first time Tuchel has had an entire week to prepare his team since the start of the Bundesliga season in late August.

The 43-year-old bemoaned in his press conference that "our entire season has been characterised by peaks and troughs" and called the situation "very unsatisfactory."

Dortmund have to show a reaction, starting with the Gladbach match. Not to get back into title consideration, though. That ship has sailed. After the defeat at Frankfurt, even the last optimist must have realised as much.

Lars Pollmann also writes for The Yellow Wall. You can follow him on Twitter.