Matchday 1: Borussia Dortmund Here and the Other 17 Clubs over There

The Bundesliga is back in its 49th incarnation and Friday’s curtain raiser was both wonderful and frightening – frightening at least for Bayern, Leverkusen and who else might have had vague hopes to win the league next year.

Dortmund 3-1 Helpless SV. Defending champions Dortmund kicked off the new season in style and with a promise of beautiful football, only they seem to be able to deliver this season. Though it needs to be said that Hamburg were welcome victims; an almost completely new team, with an almost completely new coach and almost no functioning defense at times. Yet, the way Jürgen Klopp’s boys – thanks to another round of talented youngsters signed in the summer, it’s an even younger overall squad – dismantled this in-progress Hamburg team was impressive. If they can pull off similar performances against top teams, or even compact defensive units coached by the Slomkas and Favres of the league, we’ll probably look forward to another boringly beautiful victory parade leading up to Dortmund’s next Bundesliga title. Then again, most people probably expected the same of Bayern’s second season under Louis van Gaal. Not all was doom and gloom for Hamburg either. Their wide variety of Chelsea Reserves players talented youngsters could include some real gems not named Son Heung-Min. Next weekend’s game against Hertha should give us a better idea where Hamburg stand this season.

Bayern 0-1 M’Gladbach. Bayern started into the season with a classic matchup against their former rivals M’Gladbach. Though it wasn’t nostalgia but curiosity, that made this the second most eagerly awaited game of the weekend. Bayern’s €44m reinforced answer to Dortmund was disappointingly similar to the type of uninspired possession based grind Jupp Heynckes’ Leverkusen delivered last season – just with more star power. Lucien Favre’s Gladbach meanwhile starts to show eerie similarities to a certain Hertha side, that topped the league not too long ago. But I wouldn’t yet expect pure minimalism from them this season. While Gladbach didn’t have a lot of possession, the 40% they had looked quite good, calm and controlled. Gladbach also has more creative players than Hertha, to deliver some more entertainment going forward – just not in the Allianz Arena.

Mainz 2-0 Leverkusen. Robin Dutt came to Leverkusen with a clear statement of intent: improve on last year’s season – i.e. win the Bundesliga. On their way to the title, Leverkusen have so far managed to get knocked out by a newly promoted second division side in the DFB-Pokal and lose to a team, that can claim the dubious honor to be the worst performing Bundesliga team in UEFA Cup/Europa League history. While Mainz looked much improved compared to their midweek performance, they still needed Leverkusen to literally put the ball into the net for them. The best I can make of Leverkusen at the moment is this: ?????. Now it’s up to Robin Dutt to step by step get rid of all those questions surrounding his team.

Stuttgart 3-0 Schalke. The Mercedes-Benz-Arena has been half-stadium/half-construction site for the past two seasons and Stuttgart’s squad, coaches and football also always looked to be somewhere in between as well. Some modest transfers, while losing Christian Träsch to Wolfsburg and while still being coached by Bruno Labbadia (who has some way to go to wipe out the Leverkusen/Hamburg stints from his CV), turned Stuttgart into an anonymous mid table team in my mind. Schalke on the other hand were a Champions League candidate. They lost Manuel Neuer, but otherwise made some smart signings and had some quality players return from loan spells. All of that coupled with the yet untapped potential of some of the other players, had me fully expect them to ruin Stuttgart’s grand stadium reopening festivities. And while Schalke weren’t that bad actually, Stuttgart were surprisingly good – highly organized and simply more effective than Schalke.

Hanover 2-1 Hoffenheim. Hanover and Hoffenheim mutually agreed to give their fans one half worth of promising football – with Hanover just about doing enough to take all three points. Apart from each team having 45 minutes worth of things that went right and 45 minutes worth of things to improve, they also had a referee to talk about. Just 180 minutes into the new season… After awarding a free kick to Hanover, referee Kinhöfer made a short, apparently accidental, gesture with his whistle, giving the impression he would signal when the free kick could be taken. Except he said the exact opposite to Hannover’s Jan Schlaudraff, who quickly put the ball into the back of the net, while Hoffenheim’s goalkeeper Tom Starke was still busy setting up his wall. Holger Stanislawski was not amused.

Bremen 2-0 Kaiserslautern. Knocked out in the DFB-Pokal, no money for reinforcements, half a squad out injured and with Standard and Poor’s downgrading their status to relegation strugglers, Werder Bremen fans have every reason to be positively surprised by a good not great performance and two goals by long forgotten Swedish striker Markus Rosenberg. Itay Shechter meanwhile has still some work to do to make Kaiserslautern’s fans forget Srdan Lakic.

Cologne 0-3 Wolfsburg. Volker Finke and Stale Solbakken have set out to tackle the irrationality, myth making and hero worship of Cologne and introduce more professional structures and a bit of common sense. That alone takes some guts. After stripping Lukas Podolski of his captaincy and appointing Pedro Geromel instead, Solbakken additionally made sure he has very little credit with both fans and media. Being comprehensively beaten at home by Wolfsburg then put the cherry on top of Solbakken’s less than smooth Bundesliga debut. Wolfsburg, like Stuttgart, an unexpected positive surprise and possibly responsible for Freiburg’s relegation, should Magath indeed match Freiburg’s asking price of €15-17m for Cisse.

Augsburg 2-2 Freiburg. Augsburg is widely expected to comfortably finish their first ever Bundesliga season in 18th place. Nonetheless, there are some fun times in the league to be had for Augsburg until then, including memorable moments like Augsburg’s first ever Bundesliga goal, scored by Sascha Mölders in the 53rd minute or a respectable draw against a team, that has the potential to join them at the bottom.

Hertha 0-1 Nuremberg. The capital is back in the top flight, 60000 came to see the spectacle and Hertha’s players reacted with a big dose of stage fright. Hertha with an overly cautious performance and little grip on the game. Nuremberg with a trademark gritty performance, that in this case was enough to “dominate” this game and narrowly grab the first three points on their endeavor to replicate last season’s performance without Ekici, Gündogan and Schieber but with Pekhart, Mendler and possibly and oddly Feulner.

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Category: Bundesliga