In 2011-12 season Klopp's Borussia Dortmund returned to the Champions League for the first time after an 8 or 9 year absence. Dortmund had already won the Bundesliga title the year before; they were a superb team collectively as well as individually – one only had to take look at the names of players who started their first CL match: Weidenfeller, Hummels, Subotic, Schmelzer, Piszczek, Sven Bender, Kehl (captain), Gotze, Kagawa, Grosskreutz, Lewandowski. The likes of Gundogan and Perisic were on the bench. It was an uber-talented, mature and confident team. Or so it seemed.
Borussia got a relatively easy draw with Arsenal, Marseille and Olympiakos – everyone expected the champions of Germany to do no worse than runner-up of the group, even considering the lack of Champions League experience. The first game – a 1:1 home draw against main group rivals Arsenal – seemed encouraging enough, Dortmund created the lion's share of chances (15 shots on goal vs 5) and only their profligacy in front of goal prevented them from taking all 3 points. The 2nd game was a complete shock – 0:3 defeat in Marseille, despite dominating the chances and possession even more thoroughly than in the first game. Marseille seemed to score in every meaningful attack, while the likes of Lewandowski, Gotze and Kagawa kept inexplicably missing chance after chance after chance. (Starting to sound familiar?)
I wish I could say that after those 2 games, Klopp and his team turned it around, players rediscovered their confidence in front of goal and they made it out of the group despite a difficult start. That did not happen – the young and uber-talented Dortmund team (who had successfully defended their Bundesliga title that season as well as won the German cup, blowing away Bayern Munich in the final) seem to lose all confidence playing against objectively inferior opponents in European competition. I watched some of these Champions League games and it was utterly mystifying – the players looked just as good as they did when beating up domestic opponents, they were not lacking in passion and desire and on the surface didn't seem more nervous than usual – yet somehow the crucial moments always went against them, they just couldn't convert the multitude of chances they were creating. In defense the normally fairly reliable Hummels, Weidenfeller and co. always seemed to gift a goal or two to the opposition and those weaknesses at both ends of the pitch were reinforcing each other and creating a vicious cycle. Dortmund lost the rest of their CL group games, except a nerve-wracking 1:0 home win against Olympiakos, where they were actually mostly outplayed, but paradoxically that was the only game they won in CL that year.
The parallels to this season are clear – we also have a team comprised of talented and exciting players without much winning experience (individually or together) and some of our problems, like a string of games where we just can't convert great chances to goals, look and feel familiar to anyone who closely followed Klopp at Dortmund. The bad news is that he couldn't turn it around in the CL that season – the "missing easy chances/conceding stupid goals" malaise continued until they crashed out. The good news was that next season the same team + Marco Reus, who was bought in the summer of 2012, used that negative experience from the previous season to go all the way to the Champions League final, while spectacularly outplaying the likes of Real Madrid. So what was wrong with these players in 2011? My guess is, it was simply too early for them – Champions League is a unique competition and it takes teams who are not regularly competing at that level a season or two to get acclimatized to the whole thing and that lack of familiarity can affect even the most talented players. Probably there is not much a manager can do in this situation other than to keep trying again and again, until at some point the players suddenly develop a "feel" for it. And as fans, I'm afraid, we have no choice other than to do the same – keep rooting for success, keep getting frustrated when it doesn't come, keep picking ourselves off the floor to try again and again.
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