Hamburg surprise bag

If you thought about the upcoming match last week, it wouldn’t have been hard to figure out how to succeed against the HSV. Under the former BVB-coach van Marwijk the club presented itself in an awfully clumsy way, showing deficits in all important aspects: missing motivation, poor skills, communication difficulties… You can hardly line up all mistakes that were made. But now, the performance of Hamburg does not appear that predictable anymore. New head-coach Slomka replaced van Marwijk and thereby the upcoming match turns into an unforeseeable challenge for Klopp and his team. All knowledge being acquired during the last weeks is more or less worthless when trying to figure out the best strategy to rack up the 4^th away-victory in a row.

Concerning the managerial change the aspect of new-found motivation never should be underestimated. Although Slomka will of course also take strategic actions and probably will mix up the complete squat and line-up, the biggest surprise can surely be the way how the players will present themselves on the field: full of confidence, ambition and the will to prove all their critics and detractors wrong. It is an open secret that even only the presence of a new face at the side line can set free undreamt-of strength. Nevertheless, the HSV of course still will have to face basic problems. It cannot be expected that they will

show skills and tricks like the FC Barcelona all of a sudden, as their deficits are route way to deep. In addition, their ambitious leader van der Vaart is still missing with a torn ligament (by the way: Demirbay and Badelj are suffering from the same injury currently while Beister still has a cruciate rupture). To sum it up, it is really an impossible task to make a calculation about the performance of our opponent on Saturday.

While the HSV presents itself from an uncertain side, our BVB continuously develops more and more stability. On the one hand, the last matches against Frankfurt (1:0; 4:0) and even already against Bremen showed that we are still able to take 3 points with us, and on the other hand the personal situation is comparative relaxed at the moment. All players that stood in the line-up during thr last games (e.g. Friedrich and Großkreutz replacing Reus and Hummels on their positions) gave no reasons to criticize Borussia’s performances. This reclaimed stability is hopefully the key to resist the vigorous and resolute Hamburg players. It is definite that concentration should be high when the referee blows the whistle in the Imtech-Arena in Hamburg at 3:30pm on Saturday to start the game which shall be trend-setting for our opponent’s future under new control. Borussia will possibly be able to count on Marco Reus again when trying to succeed against the ambitious horde. He is back in training and is qualities in the attacking play can be essential for a victory. In contrast, Mats Hummels presumably won’t return into the squat yet as he still

suffered from slight pain after the training some days ago.

Another aspect which may be important for the line-up on Saturday is that the first game in the round of 16 in the Champions League for Borussia Dortmund stands on the plan for Tuesday. Klopp won’t risk to draft in players like Mats Hummels if they aren’t fit completely, because they will be needed in St. Petersburg. Besides all these speculations, a look at the statistics of former matches is always interesting: no other encounter in the history of the German Bundesliga brought as many goals as this one (337 goals in 93 matches). The on last year is a good example concerning the amount of goal celebrations, as our BVB defeated Hamburg with 6:2. Alarming might probably be the fact, that away-games in Hamburg do not seem to be appreciated by Dortmund’s players. 5 of the 7 matches there were lost. Moreover, Klopp and the BVB were even defeated more often in Hamburg than in Munich by Bayern. But as seen in the last matches, Borussia Dortmund is capable of ending negative-trends when obtaining all its motivation, concentration and qualities on the field.

Possible Line-ups:

HSV: Adler - Diekmeier, Djourou, Rajkovic, Jansen - Westermann, Rincon, Arslan - Jiracek, Ilicevic – Lasogga

Coach: Slomka

Borussia Dortmund: Weidenfeller – Piszczek, Friedrich, Sokratis, Schmelzer – Sahin, Bender (Kehl) –Aubameyang, Mkhitaryan, Großkreutz (Reus) – Lewandowski

Coach: Klopp

Referee: Felix Brych

Kick-off: 22^nd day of Bundesliga; Saturday, 22.2.2014, 3:30 PM CET

Stadium: Imtech Arena

veramariko, 21.02.2014