The 151st Revierderby was, and will continue to be, notable for a number of reasons. Perhaps chief among them was that it was that rarest of sights; a match which leaves both sides shell-shocked at the final whistle.
“This derby will go down in history,” said Schalke’s Amine Harit, who scored the team’s second goal. It was just that, a moment to say in the future “I was there”, to always be remembered. Franco Di Santo grabbed his phone to take a commemorative selfie with Naldo, who scored the equaliser, and skipper Ralf Fährmann. The defender, who sparked scenes of incredulous celebration by scoring the stoppage-time leveller, netted a similarly emphatic header in the same north-end goal just under three years ago, which salvaged a late point for Wolfsburg in Jürgen Klopp’s tricky final season. This, however, was different.
“I’m 35 and I’ve never experienced anything like that in my entire career,” he blinked into the television cameras, before his interviewer asked him to describe his strike. “Cabeça de ouro,” (golden head) he grinned, maybe unable to find the right words even in a second language he has mastered.
Both the goal, and Schalke’s comeback, was one for the ages. After arriving in second place to face a wounded Borussia Dortmund, they had trailed 4-0 at the interval. The sky had fallen in on Die Königsblauen before that, actually. BVB were in a dreamland of their own when Raphaël Guerreiro’s beautifully-hit volley made it four in just the 25th minute, adding to Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s opener, Benjamin Stambouli’s own goal and Mario Götze’s first goal at Westfalen since March 2013.
Now, after “we stopped playing football” in the second half according to Peter Bosz, the coach’s position hangs by a thread. “I have the strength to solve this,” he told reporters on Saturday. The club are keeping him for now, but life doesn’t look like getting any easier with the improving Leverkusen away next in the Bundesliga, followed by Real Madrid away in the Champions League – a competition BVB may already be eliminated from. If Bosz is to have any hope of an opportunity to repeat his Europa League heroics with Ajax, they may have to prise a result from the Bernabéu.
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We can’t assume he’ll last that long. For a few weeks, Dortmund’s problem has clearly been confidence – with the pivotal Julian Weigl really struggling – rather than the specifics of Bosz’s much picked-over tactics. Saturday night was the occasion of the club’s AGM, and Bosz was hardly given resounding backing from Hans-Joachim Watzke, with the coach having to sit through the CEO telling him he needed to “leave no stone unturned to get us on the right sporting path”.
Epic comebacks aren’t totally unprecedented in this fixture. In Klopp’s first Revierderby, just his fourth Bundesliga game in charge in September 2008, his side came back from a 3-0 half-time deficit, inspired by a brace from substitute Alex Frei. That result really gave Klopp lift-off in his Dortmund career, and Domenico Tedesco will surely be able to dine out on this for years, having already impressed with his work to date.
Fährmann, the guest on ZDF’s Aktuelle Sportstudio on Saturday night, told host Sven Voss how the 32-year-old had approached the most testing team talk of his embryonic top-flight coaching career. “He called us close together and got down on his knees,” said the goalkeeper. “He said that we had to learn from the game there and then; that a first half like that can happen, but to see the second half as a new game.”
Tedesco also pointed out to his players that Dortmund would be twitchy after their recent poor run. Naldo’s insistence that the team actually did see it as 0-0 in that second period was apparent. Yes, Schalke rode their luck, as Tedesco openly admitted – and Thilo Kehrer really should have been sent off after bad challenges on Nuri Sahin and Andriy Yarmolenko – but got themselves in just the right spot to take advantage of BVB nerves, underlined by Aubameyang’s red card for two bookings, both borne of anxiety to defend hard. Tedesco coached hard, too, making a double change in the 33rd minute and then spending his final change at half-time, sending on Matija Nastasic and sparing the prone Kehrer further punishment.
The lasting impression left by Tedesco only compounded Bosz’s failure. As at Stuttgart last week, Dortmund were Jekyll and Hyde, full of zest in the first half and flat as a pancake in the second. “The coach is ultimately responsible for the physical condition of the team,” wrote Sunday’s Ruhr Nachrichten. Anyone who has saw Bosz after the game – totally shocked, helpless and disillusioned – can hardly imagine that a lasting turnaround is possible with him.”
The repercussions will continue to be felt on both sides of the fence, but this didn’t feel like the time to think too much about the past or the future. It was about the moment, perhaps best encapsulated by phone footage on social media of Schalke chairman Clemens Tönnies ecstatic in the away end with his son as Naldo brought the game level. Those scenes, on and off the field, will be pored over in the days to come as Dortmund and Schalke try to make sense of this dizzying occasion.
Talking points
• If there was a sneaking suspicion that Jupp Heynckes’s Bayern Munich hadn’t had a serious test since he returned as coach, they certainly got one at Borussia Mönchengladbach. At a club where Heynckes appeared over 600 times as player and coach before saying a tearful goodbye as Bayern coach at Borussia Park in 2013, he fell to a first defeat in his latest spell. Dieter Hecking’s Gladbach were compact, disciplined and incredibly industrious, overcoming the early loss of the unlucky Christoph Kramer to another head injury after colliding with his own defender, Jannik Vestergaard. Hecking, incidentally, later called for more protection for players from head knocks. This was almost as close to bare bones as Bayern could ever really claim, with Arjen Robben absent, Thiago Alcântara ruled out long-term and youngsters Marco Friedl and Kwasi Okyere Wriedt making first-team debuts. More perplexing to Heynckes was Uli Hoeness’ claim to the 1,500 members gathered at the club’s AGM on Friday that the coach could stay on. “I do not know what moved Uli to say something like that,” said Heynckes. “We have a clear agreement, and it goes until 30 June.”
• That loss means that Leipzig were able to move three points behind the leaders thanks to a 2-0 win over Werder Bremen, putting an end to the Florian Kohfeldt revival. The renewed Naby Keïta scored his second of the week and, as striker Yussuf Poulsen said afterwards, his side played a “clever” game, pacing their efforts after their Champions League exertions.
• Leverkusen will be raring to face Dortmund, after extending their unbeaten run to 10 in all competitions by winning at Eintracht Frankfurt. It was a lively game in which Heiko Herrlich’s side started at full throttle, with Lucas Alario hitting the woodwork twice in the first half, and ended up thanking Bernd Leno for preserving the points with some big saves. Kevin Volland’s winner makes him the top German scorer in the Bundesliga, though he dampened suggestions of a national call-up. “Timo Werner is a super player,” he deadbatted.
• Having finally ended their run of draws under new coach Martin Schmidt last week, Wolfsburg lost their first game under the former Mainz boss at Augsburg, which was his 10th in charge. It should have a bright asterisk next to it, though, with Max Arnold given an early and very debatable red card for an apparent deliberate denial of a goalscoring opportunity, upgraded from referee Tobias Stieler’s original yellow by VAR. Stieler, to his credit, attempted to explain himself at length, but it underlined how far the technology has drifted from what it was meant to be – cutting out clear errors. “There can only be one solution,” wrote an irate Wolfsburger Allgemeine. “Stop this crap! As quickly as possible!”
• At the bottom, it was Groundhog Day for poor Köln, who remain marooned on two points after their latest inept display, at home to Hertha, for whom two Vedad Ibisevic goals won the day. Coach Peter Stöger led training on Monday morning – an unusual move, pointed out Express, as the first-team players won’t arrive until the afternoon after Sunday’s game, and perhaps an act of defiance – but the board continue to discuss his position. Freiburg, who have suffered some bad luck and worse injuries, bought themselves some daylight with a harder-than-it-should-have-been win over Mainz, while Hamburg – inspired by Filip Kostić, who scored their second – swept to a win over a Hoffenheim side who looked exhausted from their Europa League efforts.
• Finally it was a Friday night draw between Hannover and Stuttgart, and the main attention was around Horst Heldt, whose hometown club Köln have made an attempt to recruit him as sporting director. Hannover president Martin Kind intends to hold him to his contract, though. For Stuttgart, a first away point of the season at the seventh attempt, on the back of Arsenal loanee Takuma Asano’s first goal, was more than enough excitement for them.
Results: Cologne 0-2 Hertha Berlin, Hamburg 3-0 Hoffenheim, Augsburg 2-1 Wolfsburg, Borussia Dortmund 4-4 Schalke, Borussia Mönchengladbach 2-1 Bayern Munich, Eintracht Frankfurt 0-1 Bayer Leverkusen, RB Leipzig 2-0 Werder Bremen, SC Freiburg 2-1 Mainz, Hannover 1-1 Stuttgart.