“It’s a shame that we couldn’t win. Much more was possible,” said TSG midfielder Anton Stach on 29 September, shortly after the final whistle in the Bundesliga match against Borussia Dortmund. BVB were by no means the superior side that Friday evening, but they did return to the Ruhr region with a 3-1 win in the bag. Coach Edin Terzic has been subjected to criticism that BVB do not play attractive enough football for months. But after nine rounds of Bundesliga fixtures, the club are in fourth place, have not yet lost a match and could even move past Bayern when they face the record champions on Saturday.
It marks a departure from “free-flowing football”, the words TSG coach Pellegrino Matarazzo used to describe the style of play that has set Borussia Dortmund apart in the past. BVB are currently getting results, winning matches and – even more importantly – hardly losing any. Dortmund have lost only one Bundesliga game in the 2023 calendar year and across their 28 matches BVB have picked up seven points more than FC Bayern, nine more than Leipzig and 10 more than Leverkusen. Edin Terzic’s goal is to win the first championship since 2012, which seemed closer than ever last season. But BVB also want to go far in the cup; after winning the competition in 2021, they have been eliminated in the last 16 (2-1 at St. Pauli) and in the quarter-finals (2-0 at RB Leipzig) in the past two seasons.
The result will therefore also be in the foreground on Wednesday when TSG Hoffenheim pay a visit in the DFB-Pokal. “The schedule does not allow us to focus on anything else,” said Terzic when asked about the top match on Saturday. Nonetheless, he sees his team as the clear favourites, saying: “There would certainly have been easier draws for Hoffenheim than coming to Dortmund and we want to live up to that.”