24 minutes were enough for Paco Alcácer to arrive in Dortmund. With his goal against Frankfurt, he is on a par with Márcio Amoroso and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. But his coach warns.
The celebrations weren’t really over yet, the supporters were still bathing in the luck of the second win of the season and the short-term lead in the standings, when the hero of the evening caused his coach some serious worries again.
Paco Alcácer had only played a good 20 minutes, he had introduced the important 2:1 with an artistic steep pass and had scored the crowning 3:1 against Eintracht Frankfurt himself. But then he “felt something in his thigh”, as Lucien Favre later reported, an appearance at the Champions League in Bruges next Tuesday is at risk.
But the few minutes of playing time were enough to inspire the imagination. Alcácer played eight passes, they all arrived, and the Dortmund club proudly announced via its own media channels that the 25-year-old is already part of an exclusive circle of memorable BVB attackers. Just like Márcio Amoroso, the star striker of the 2002 championship year, and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, his first shot on goal in the Bundesliga landed right in the net.
“You can have fun with him, you can gamble with him, I think he will be a lot of fun for us,” said Marius Wolf about the new addition to FC Barcelona and sports director Michael Zorc added: “You can see that he understands football and can combine it with the team.
Only Favre didn’t want to get into the hymns of praise. Of course, he also liked the performance of the striker many experts had expected in the starting eleven. However, the coach seemed to feel confirmed in his eternal sermon by the patience after the Spaniard’s thigh did not even survive these 20 minutes unscathed: “He hasn’t played regularly for two years, it still takes time to get fit.”
The fact that Alcácer is urgently needed was also evident on this evening. Instead of speed and force, as in the better times of the recent past, this performance before Alcácer’s substitution was marked by a portion of pragmatism that was unusual for Dortmund.
For a long time, the construction game seemed tough and laborious. It’s fundamentally positive to “stand defensively good and controlled”, Zorc said to critics whose eyes had missed beauty and ferocity. At the same time, however, the sports director assured that there would very soon be games again in which the BVB would “gain more chances”.
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Lucien Favre, however, has never been a coach whose teams are on the pitch week after week for a thrilling attacking spectacle. When in doubt, the Swiss is banking on stability, and that can be seen in the many small decisions made by the pros on the pitch.
In fact, the Frankfurters had practically no chance of scoring beyond the goal. However, Zorc found another aspect even more remarkable: As in Fürth and against Leipzig, the BVB had admitted very annoying equalizing goals after their own leadership.
Such setbacks had often unsettled the team in the past two seasons, stirred up fears and sowed doubts. Now the team has “come back again” despite the goal scored, said Zorc. That was “a sign of mentality”. And from a brilliantly occupied substitutes’ bench.
Both teams had run a lot with about 120 kilometres each, the freshness with which Jadon Sancho, Axel Witsel and Alcácer enriched the game in the final phase was one of the key factors. During the week Favre had been complaining a bit about the big squad (“We are too many.”), because prominent professionals like Julian Weigl or Shinji Kagawa didn’t even belong to the squad. Mario Götze sat on the bench for the third time for 90 minutes in the third Bundesliga game. If you are fond of online casino games, then Vernons Sports if one of the trusted sports betting sites.
Now it turned out that a lot of quality in the back rows can be worth a lot. Sancho prepared the second and third goals, Witsel was immediately very present and Alcácer exceeded all expectations anyway.