Against Barça not in starting eleven
© Imago
Niko Kovac did not want to speak of a memo for Julian Brandt after the Champions League. The BVB coach justified the waiver of the offensive player in the starting XI at 3-1 (1-0) against FC Barcelona with his recent workload. “Julian has just played everything in the past few weeks. I thought he needed a break,” said Kovac after the quarter-finals. “Julian continues to have the status that he had before.”
After taking office in early February, Kovac had compared the 28-year-old to the world-class players Jamal Musiala from FC Bayern and Florian Wirtz from Bayer Leverkusen. But Brandt has been out of shape for months, which also reduces its market value – from 35 million to 25 million euros. In the end, the criticism of him became more and more louder.
After a weak performance at 2-2 on Saturday at Bayern, Brandt against Barça was only substituted in the 77th minute. Without him in the starting eleven, Dortmund showed the best performance in a long time, but was left out of the first leg despite the victory because of the 0: 4 mortgage-with the noble technician was unlucky when he was revoked the supposed 4: 1 due to an offside position just two minutes after his substitution.
BVB: Guirassy “proud” for second leg – question about the constancy
“I am proud of our performance. We showed what we can do. But it’s a shame that our way is over,” said the outstanding Serhou Guirassy, who played as unleashed and was able to add the first defeat to the Catalans this year with a triple pack (11th, penalty/49th/76th minute). Afterwards there was praise from Barcelona’s coach Hansi Flick: “Dortmund has a fantastic team. They did it very well.”
Guirassy shot his hits eleven, twelve and thirteen in the ongoing competition – club record. Even Erling Haaland and the current Barça scorer Robert Lewandowski had not achieved this brand.
But Guirassy’s triple pack was not enough after the performance from the previous week. “We turned this into the first leg, the performance was too bad,” was a strong Niklas Süle from the “Waz“Quoted.” Today we believed that all eleven men on the pitch and the entire bench. I am megastolz on the team. And the question is why we don’t always play in the Bundesliga?