- Commissioner’s statement on Ventura, Marte
- Ronnie O’Sullivan: Masters champion ‘felt so vulnerable’ in final
- Arron Fletcher Wins 2017 WSOP International Circuit Marrakech Main Event ($140,224)
- Smith challenges Warner to go big in India
- Moncada No. 1 on MLB Pipeline’s Top 10 2B Prospects list
- Braves land 2 on MLB Pipeline’s Top 10 2B Prospects list
- Kingery makes MLB Pipeline’s Top 10 2B Prospects list
- New Zealand wrap up 2-0 after Bangladesh implosion
- Mathews, Pradeep, Gunathilaka to return to Sri Lanka
- Elliott hopes for rain for Poli
Borussia Dortmund Could Be in for Slow Start to 2016/17 Season
- Updated: August 12, 2016
Pre-season is finally coming to a close for Borussia Dortmund, with the DFL-Supercup against Bundesliga champions Bayern Munich on Sunday in Signal Iduna Park marking the starting point for the coming season.
The Black and Yellows will play two more friendly matches against 2. and 3. Bundesliga sides SV Sandhausen and Hallescher FC, as well as the first round of the DFB-Pokal against Eintracht Trier, a fourth-division club, before the start of the Bundesliga campaign.
However, even though the Supercup doesn’t have great importance in Germany, it can be considered the curtain raiser of the season. For the Black and Yellows, it also signifies the end of a difficult summer that could well lead into a slow start to the season.
Much has been made of their busy transfer window, in which they’ve so far made 12 first-team transfers alone.
The big challenge is now to integrate eight new players into a team that saw its hierarchy shaken up with the sales of team captain Mats Hummels, midfield mastermind Ilkay Gundogan and Henrikh Mkhitaryan, who arguably was the club’s best player last season.
The meeting with nemesis Bayern will not be much of a measuring stick in that regard, seeing as head coach Thomas Tuchel already more or less ruled out selecting players who only joined up with the team for the training camp in Bad Ragaz, Switzerland, at the start of August, per Spox.com’s Jochen Tittmar (link in German).
That would mean the Ruhr side will be without Lukasz Piszczek, Raphael Guerreiro, Julian Weigl, Mario Gotze and Andre Schurrle, all possible or even presumptive starters in the coming months.
Even with first-choice XIs, the Supercup has rarely been indicative of the season it preceded. The Bavarians, for example, lost all three attempts to win the trophy under Pep Guardiola before running away with the Bundesliga title with 19 and (twice) 10 points advantage over the second-placed teams.
In fact, no Supercup champion has go on to win the league in the same season since the one-off match was reintroduced in 2010.
Of course, that mostly has to do with the scheduling two weeks ahead of the start of the domestic campaign and the minor status of the competition. Fans of the losing side on Sunday won’t be too down.
However, a defeat for Dortmund would fit the mould of this pre-season. In short, it feels as if there was a spanner in the Black and …
continue reading in source www.bleacherreport.com
