Almost final after final

The new Champions League, built on a complex “all against some” league system, also has its quirks. Today is one of them. 143 days after the last final played at Wembley, Madrid and Borussia Dortmund will meet again at the Bernabeu in a match that is less dramatic but truly important. Especially for Ancelotti’s team after the defeat in Lille, which pushed them back from the top eight, who have the bonus of avoiding a draw in the round of 16. (follow today’s match live on As.com).

In London and here in Madrid things have gotten moderately worse. After winning the last Champions League without defeat, fell in the second match of the first stage against Lille and overall the experience was worse than the game. Looking for immediate solutions, Ancelotti reorganized the team with three central defenders in Vigo, but it did not work. They fired at Madrid thirteen times. The goal was to improve batting performance. It’s been a black hole since Kroos left the team, but that only works when Modric is playing. So a return to a 4-4-2 or 4-2-3-1 is expected today if Rodrigo returns to the eleven, with the Croatian remaining a big unknown.

In any case, Madrid managed to hide their problems at the Bernabeu, where He won all six games of the course. In Europe He hasn’t fallen in two and a half years. And this significantly weakened the traditional German danger. From the last 21 games against German teams They have only lost once, against Leipzig in 2022. His current opponent has never been able to beat him in seven visits. Over 26 years, he met him 15 times. Only against Bayern and Juventus did Madrid play more in the Champions League. So today’s fight has become a modern classic.

Nine on the series

Dortmund, a club that promotes players under the label of seller (it has earned almost 1 billion in the last eight years), spent a lot (80) in the summer on rejuvenating the team.. Veterans such as Hummels and Reus left, Maatsen and Sancho returned to the Premier League and striker Füllkrug was sold to West Ham. But in return, the best reinforcements arrived: German national team players Anton and Gross, former Girona player Yann Couto, who was on Madrid’s radar, and, above all, a Frenchman of Guinean origin. Serou Guirassi, second top scorer in the Bundesliga last year for Stuttgart and that in this game he has seven goals in seven games. In the last FIFA window, he scored five goals in two matches against Ethiopia for Guinea Conakry, which he shares with Naby Keita or Ilaix Moriba.

Guirassi is now 28 years old and has had an interesting career spanning the French league and Bundesliga. He started at Stade Lavallois but failed to achieve success at Lille or Auxerre. He finished second with Cologne, played a modest role at Amiens and Stade Rennes and, suddenly, He exploded by loaning him to Stuttgart, who bought him for 9 million after a first year on loan in which he scored 14 goals. Last season he signed 30 contracts in 30 games and Atlético noticed him. In the end, Borussia bought him because of his clause: 18 million.

A strong player, opportunism is his main weapon. “I always try to be in the right place. I like watching players like Lewandowski or Haaland. “I used to run all over the place, but now I’ve learned a lot about myself and I know it’s all about being prepared for the terrain.”

Shahin’s Big Jump

Guirassi is not the only big news in Dortmund. This is also Nuri Shahin, his coach, second last year after Erdin Terzic and with a white background: he played a season in Madrid with Mourinho (“He is a fantastic person, although he can be very tough and very direct”). The white club paid 10 million for him, but he was injured in the first training session and took five months to recover. He ended up playing just ten games, making eight starts and scoring one goal. He was then loaned to Liverpool, Dortmund and finally Madrid. He resold it to the German team for seven million. He spent another six years in the Bundesliga, two of them with Werder Bremen, before ending his career almost abruptly in Turkey. In 2020, he arrived at Antalyaspor, where he played one season, and at the beginning of the next, when he had already played eight games, the club fired Ersun Yanal and appointed him. “One day I went to training, and when I returned home, I was already a coach.”

When he was still a footballer, he coached lower division teams. “I tried everything there and knew that if it worked there, it would work in professional football.” And he applied this in Antalya until last winter, when Dortmund called him as Terzic’s second. His experience as a footballer under He was helped by Jurgen Klopp or Thomas Tuchel: “These are the specialists who most influenced my career. Together with them I fell in love with the tactical board”. The German press said he did not want to train at the Bernabeu yesterday to avoid being spied on. He denied this at a press conference.

He comes to Madrid with four important victims: Duranville, Reyna, Yan Couto and especially Adeyemi.That arrow, capable of reaching speeds of 36 km/h, broke after scoring a hat-trick against Celtic in the last European match. There, in the Champions League, Dortmund performed exceptionally well, He leads the 36-man table with two wins from two games and ten goals scored. The championship started unconventionally: two defeats and a draw in seven matches. They are currently seventh, four points behind leaders Bayern.

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