It's now or never

And here we are again having another "do or die" game in front of us. I don't know how you feel, but I have enough of them at the moment. It's just too much excitement and stress in these last weeks that I could really need a break. Unfortunately we don’t just get it yet.

So what’s in store for us tomorrow? As I said, well I suppose you all know it anyhow, we need to win this last game against Marseille or we can call the Champions league season quits which would result in playing half a year Europa League. Okay this is not 100% correct, I will tell you the different possibilities later on but let’s first see what the facts are. Marseille doesn’t even get to play Europe League. The French team lost all their games in this group and has therefore nothing to lose or to gain in this last match. It’s for you to decide if this is an advantage or a downside. The Borussia officials and players however are repeating themselves: the situation couldn’t be more dangerous. We can therefore be assured that they won’t take this game lightly, how could they. However if you saw the last game against Leverkusen the timing for this game is the worst. Manni will definitely not play as his injury turned out to be a torn ligament in his ankle. It is yet unknown if Nuri Sahin can participate but it should be clear to everyone that he won’t be in the starting eleven. We can be sure that Gündogan, Hummels, Subotic und Schmelzer will be missing, as they have yet to recover as well as Friedrich who is not allowed to participate in the Champions League. We already know that our young boys Koray Günter and Marian Sarr are going to fly to Marseille with the rest of the team. It is again for you to decide if our boys will be more motivated since they lost in Leverkusen or are less self-confident because of the last game. My hopes here are with Klopp and his staff to pull the right strings and say the right words as they so often do.

Ok so what are the possible outcomes for this last match day?

1. We win against Marseille and whatever Neapel does against Arsenal is for naught, we will definitely play Champions League next season.
2. We only manage to play a draw against Marseille, while Neapel wins against Arsenal. That would leave us in third place and Champions League would be over for us.
3. Neapel and Arsenal leave the pitch after 90 minutes with a draw, while we only manage to do the same against Marseille. That would still leave us in second place since we have the better goal difference and won the comparison (lost 1:2 in Neapel – won 3:1 in Dortmund).
4. Last but not the least we lose in Marseille. That would leave two options: Neapel lost as well and we are still second, or Neapel achieves 1 point or more and overtakes us and gets the second place.

As I said WE REALLY NEED TO WIN THIS GAME! I don’t want to watch the game in the 85th minute praying all the time for Arsenal to win their match against Neapel, because we couldn’t win in Marseille. Right now I can copy the exact same words my colleague used in his warm-up post against Leverkusen, because the situation couldn’t be more identical. “Taking all factors into consideration you come to the same conclusion as always: no result can be foreseen and looking for excuses (like injury problems) even before the referee gave the whistle signal only causes headache and madness! Therefore we should trust in the qualities of our coach, the team and the supporters who will invest everything they have to achieve the optimum outcome.” However I want to end this with some encouraging words from our beloved coach: “This is not a situation where the sun is shining and everything is working world class. But we want to overwinter in the Champions League. And you will see exactly that in us. We won’t get any charity points in Marseille.”

His words couldn’t be more correct. Last but not least I will try to give you a possible line-up, considering everything I said before, this won’t be easy, but here it comes.

Possible Line – Ups:

Borussia Dortmund: Weidenfeller - Piszczek, Sokratis, Großkreutz, Durm – Kehl (Sahin) Mkhitaryan – Blaszczykowski (Hofmann), Reus, Aubameyang – Lewandowski
Coach: J. Klopp

Olympique Marseille: Mandanda – Fanni, Diawara, Mendes, Morel – Imbula, Lemina, Cheyrou – Romao, A. Ayew, Khalifa
Coach: J. Anigo

Referee: M. Strahonja

Stadium: Stade Vélodrome (60.031)

Kick-off: 20:45 CET

Chris 10.12.2013

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