Today is the final Saturday of the first half of the season, day 19 of the advent calendar. In the Freiburg calendar behind door number 19 was Georgian-German midfielder Lucas Hufnagel. Quite fitting to get him this week considering that earlier in the week his former team Unterhaching played in the last 16 round of the DFB Pokal and put in a very impressive performance against Bundesliga side Leverkusen.
It’s the final Saturday in another way too, tonight is the last two episodes of The Bridge. I’ll either finally get some answers or be very disappointed. Or most likely a combination of both.
It’s also fitting that today’s DFB card was of a Dortmund player too, though unfortunately it didn’t bring them any luck. For the third year in a row they lost their last game before Christmas losing 2-1 to Köln. Though obviously they are in a lot better shape than they were at this point last year. True they are unlikely to catch Bayern at the top but it’s still a remarkable turnaround. They’ve played 17, won 12, drawn 2 and lost 3. They have 38 points and a goal difference of plus 24 having scored 47 and conceded 23.
Compare that to last season in which they’d won just four games, drawn three and lost a staggering ten games. Even Freiburg who were bottom of the table at Christmas had only lost six. At that point Dortmund had just fifteen points with a goal difference of minus eight, having scored 18 and conceded 26. To put it another way this season it took them only until MD5 to score as many goals as it took them 17 games to do last season. And in that time they only conceded three. So like I said a huge improvement. Anyhow Ilkay Gundögan’s card and then Neven Subotic from the Dortmund calendar:
