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Borussia Dortmund shortchanged in Bundesliga's team of the weekend

  Jürgen Klopp's men deserved more credit for what might have been the performance of their season in beating Hamburg 6-2

 

Borussia Dortmund's Marco Reus, centre, was praised by Jürgen Klopp for his part in the 6-2 win over Hamburger SV Photograph: Ina Fassbender/Reuters

Man-marking has generally died out in the Bundesliga, along with moustaches and mullets – at least the non-ironic ones. But in the confines of tabloid newspapers and the venerable Kicker magazine, the practice is still very much alive.

It might surprise the interested reader to find out that a sizable contingent of players in the German top flight continue to take a strong, verging-on-unhealthy, interest in the marks (1-6, in ascending order of nicht gut) awarded to them by reporters who spend, on average, 45-60 seconds on this exercise.

Politics are occasionally involved, of course – there used to be some players who could never be marked worse than a 4 – but the grades seem to matter because they are seen as real: unlike in other countries, the full spectrum, from 1 (very good) to 6 (lacking severely) is regularly applied. You want nuances? Half marks are allowed, too.

But those numbers are only part of the grading process. Equally, if not more prestigious, is a nomination for Kicker's "Elf des Tages" — the XI of the weekend. One big problem for the reporters is to come up with formations that vaguely resemble realistic line-ups in the face of too many outstanding attacking players. German editorial standards are stringent and uncompromising in that respect – you cannot play with two at the back, even if you are Pep Guardiola or Thomas Schaaf.

On Monday, however, the colleagues at Kicker got it badly wrong. There were five Borussia Dortmund players in the line-up. Five. It is a ludicrous number, so wrong that it verges on the offensive. It makes you wonder if stumbling upon it this morning forced Dortmund's CEO Hans-Joachim Watzke, a quiet, reserved man who shuns the limelight and hates giving interviews, to pick up the phone and demand satisfaction from the men in Nuremberg (where Kicker is based) in the strongest possible terms.

We do not know if he did get involved but he would have been right to: there should have been at least nine Dortmund players in the list. They were that good in the 6-2 win against Hamburger SV.

Granted, the centre-back Neven Subotic had a bit of nightmare and had to be substituted before the referee could send him off. In goal, Roman Weidenfeller lived through one of those uncomfortable evenings that most keepers will have experienced at some stage: hardly anything to save but the two Hamburg goals (Zhi Gin Lam's sensational corner-curler, Heiko Westermann's close-range header) were unstoppable.

Everybody else, however, had a good case for being included in the XI, since Dortmund did not just produce their best performance of the season but, quite possibly, the performance of the whole season. There was a moment in the second half, when one attacking move tore through the dozy Hamburg lines like a school of barracudas, that the Westfalenstadion seemed unable to contain its joy.

A few goals more, you feared, and the whole ground would have burst at the seams, spewing out bits of yellow like a popcorn machine in the cinema. "It's madness what the boys in attack played today, simply amazing," said Jürgen Klopp.

Marco Reus, he added, deserved "to get to heaven" for leaving the ball to Robert Lewandowski before Dortmund's fourth goal.

Going forward, everyone was sensational – special mentions for Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang (1-0, 3-2) and Henrikh Mkhitaryan (2-0) – but Reus was out of this world; a raft of missed chances notwithstanding. His incredibly cool shot through Dennis Diekmeier's legs (5-2) capped off a superlative show from the 24-year-old. "Our transition game was frightening," said Klopp and he was right, in more ways than one.

Dortmund have managed to integrate the new signings so well that they look like having been around for ever. The team's devilishly hard to learn – and even harder to stop – collective pressing and switching already works much better than anyone could have anticipated at this stage.

Five wins out of five have made this Borussia's best start to the league – 32 shots on goal equalled their own record versus Bremen this season. Aubameyang's superhuman pace – Bild counted 51 high-tempo sprints and clocked a maximum speed of 35.1 kilometres an hour – has turbo-charged the whole attack.

Wednesday's Champions League game at Napoli will show if this is shaping up for a customary all-or-nothing season under Klopp or if the team can reach the next evolutionary level and perform consistently in both main competitions for once.

Self-critical appraisals from Weidenfeller – "we lacked focus in some situations, you can't award your opponent too many chances" – and Reus –"it makes you vomit if you lead 2-0 and then concede two goals out of nothing"– certainly suggest a new maturity and Klopp cleverly made use of the opportunity to demand more respect for Mats Hummels – the centre-back had been left out by Jogi Löw in the two recent World Cup qualifiers and subjected to some harsh criticism in the press.

"When mistakes are awarded names, it's not unlikely that a Dortmund player is involved," claimed Klopp, who was careful not too attack Löw too overtly. "We will talk about it in the next few weeks," replied the Germany manager, in a conciliatory mood.

In case you were wondering, only the goalkeeper René Adler was awarded a half-decent (3) grade by Kicker. Lam was marked 4.5, the rest were 5s, 5.5s and downright 6s.

Thorsten Fink's risible tactics – the HSV coach started with three at the back, then changed it to a 4-4-2 with a diamond in midfield, before settling on 4-2-3-1 – were apparently not considered in the marking process. "The system wasn't too blame," insisted Fink. Impossible to say really, as there wasn't one.