Borussia Dortmund vs Real Madrid is an encounter that never fails to excite – pulsating, high-scoring matches, Robert Lewandowski-inspired score lines (4-1) and Jurgen Klopp-orchestrated Westphalian (2-0) supremacy.
Madrid has never won a match at the Signal Iduna Park. As the melodramatic Georg Friedrich Händel-inspired Champions League hymn rang out in Dortmund, guttural chants of "BVB" descended from the Sudtribune – not the monstrous, sprawling basin of yellow madness of Bundesliga match days, but a UEFA-imposed all-seater stand.
"A positive aura", pre-match words from Dortmund’s coach Thomas Tuchel swept through the imposing arena – this was going to be the best game on the planet and the hosts were to beat the defending European Champions.
In a flurry of early free-kicks, both Cristiano Ronaldo and Gonzalo Castro came close to opening the score. Dortmund had reasons to be boisterous: they had scored 16 goals in their first five German league matches, including a 6-0 drubbing of SV Darmstadt 98. They demolished Legia Warszawa from Poland with the same scoreline in the Champions League.
Tuchel’s outfit is another expression of Dortmund’s fine tradition of building teams at the edge of contemporary football sophistication. At Dortmund, the 43-year-old coach, an economics graduate and admirer of Scandinavian furniture, is trying to emulate his illustrious predecessor Klopp.
Differential learning
At times, Tuchel’s approach is unorthodox. He believes in the theory of differential learning: players don’t learn and improve by virtue of repetition and perfecting drills, but by adapting their technique, intuitively, to a steady stream of critical situations. Under Klopp, Dortmund played heavy-metal football, with Gegenpressing as a cornerstone. Tuchel’s team also has many fine traits: possession-orientated, quick transitions and confidence in youth players.
Last Friday, that was in evidence against Freiburg. Ousmane Dembele, 21, waltzed back and forth on his right wing, displayed some youthful nonchalance at times, but was a scourge throughout. Together with Julian Weigl, 21, and Raphael Guerreiro, 22, he is a prodigy.
In the first 15 minutes, the infiltrations of Mario Gotze and Castro troubled Madrid, but the irresistible Ronaldo struck at the other end as the hosts were guilty of too much goal lust. The Portuguese showed the visitors’ counter potency, punishing Dortmund’s daring high line.
Ronaldo had sulked on Saturday when coach Zinedine Zidane subbed him in the 72nd minute. Against Las Palmas, Real ultimately laboured to a second consecutive draw in La Liga, augmenting the pressure on the French coach.
Zidane's predicament
That’s the rub about Real Madrid: even after winning the Champions League last May, even after nearly getting a record 16 consecutive wins in the Spanish league, some argue that Zidane has been fortuitous so far.
In January, Madrid had welcomed Zidane as the new messiah in the Spanish capital. In Milan, Zidane destroyed Diego Simeone’s doctrine, drill and the notion that rigour and resilience can triumph over economic imperatives and the overall might and myth of a behemoth. Ronaldo’s penalty was good enough to win La Undecima.
It’s strange predicament for Zidane to be in. His budding coaching career is under threat from the nagging question if the Zizou effect is already on the wane in the Spanish capital – if he is more than just a club icon at the right place, at the right time?
The match against Dortmund was another case in point. Madrid were an amorphous mass, top-heavy with BBC (Benzema-Bale-Cristiano). They often play a subterranean form of power football – a style that ill befits the galactic club. As a player, Zidane was part of the Galacticos, a short-lived era of Madridista supremacy, perched on superstars and a collective understanding.
Blue-collar Madrid
BBC are A-list players and icons in their own right, but Madrid’s personnel makeup today is distinctly more blue collar. This season Mariano Diaz, Marco Asensio and Alvaro Morata all arrived in the first squad with a Madrid DNA.
Whimsical Madrid president Florentino Perez has less maneuver space with the FIFA-imposed transfer ban on his club. That should allow Zidane to implement his coaching vision and a sustainable future, but much of Madrid’s game feels as the expression of 11 overly-gifted individuals, the sum of their parts, but nothing more.
In the first half Dortmund had 63% of ball possession and 10 attempts on goal, repeatedly forcing Kaylor Navas into fine saves. At the brink of halftime, the hosts got a well-deserved equaliser, with Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang stabbing the ball over the line from a rebound off a Raphaël Guerreiro free-kick.
In the second stanza, Dortmund did not maintain the same intensity, passing, penetrating, probing and poking all a bit less, their high line tweaked as well. At the hour mark, Madrid had a brighter spell, which culminated with Raphaël Varane’s goal.
The Germans were rattled, but regrouped, playing with their trademark vigour, virtuoso and strategic intelligence in the last minutes, grabbing a late equaliser through a fine finish from substitute Andre Schürrle. A winner was not to be for Dortmund, but the promise of youth had always been palpable. For Madrid, ruthless and consummate in their counters, the 90 minutes were the confirmation of a recurring footballistic deficit, the lack of a true expansionist game.