the Brozovic teaser (BVB-Inter)
This is a small teaser of the longer match analysis of Tuesday’s epic 3-2 UCL match between Dortmund and Inter, to read the whole piece and for more content
Epic Brozo
At around the 20 minute mark, as Dortmund were coming more and more into the game with Brandt, Hazard and Hakimi, Inter’s Marcelo Brozovic exerted his presence on the match. As a result, Inter had 51% possession until the 2nd goal at the 41st minute mark, with the Croatian, whose portion of the entire match’s possession was 5.8% had the ball 8% of the time btw minutes 21-41. And it’s not like Favre’s Dortmund didn’t have a plan, using both Götze and Brandt to cover him.
In this sequence, as Brandt is the lead striker, Götze is following Brozovic
and he is doing a decent job, as Inter are forced to pass the ball around Dortmund’s press. When the ball is switched to Godin, Götze, after about ten seconds of chasing Brozovic, switches off for a second. But the Croatian keeps moving and finds the space in - between the Dortmund pressing scheme.
His one timer pass to Lukaku is intercepted by Hummels, but Brozo was not done.
A few minutes later, Dortmund sort of collectively fail to account for Brozovic: Sancho doesn’t block centrally, Brandt is off on the far side, while Götze is woefully behind, leaving Brozo to rampage up the field
and find Lukaku making a nice run off Hummels. Brandt was a little more successful at times, staying much closer and forcing others to make difficult passes:
in this case, Skriniar’s low pass is picked off by Hazard and Brandt has a chance from it.
Of course, there were times when both Brandt and Götze failed:
most “sixes” make the blue-arrowed passes sideways or backwards, but Brozovic seem to have a preternatural ability to recognize space. He realizes that he can turn around and exploit the room left by Dortmund in the center
Götze feebly tries to close him down, but the 26-year-old has too much juice and just gets by them and is actually able to ping a ball wide to Biraghi on the left wing. Of course that is not even the best move of his in the first half, for that comes before the 2nd Inter goal:
Yet again, he is able to get by Brandt and Götze and explode into the central zone, before Weigl unsuccessfully tries to tackle him.
His thirty yard scamper ends with a pushed pass to Lautaro, who does a Cruyff turn and smacks it across to Candreva.
Witsel is late off Vecino, Lukaku takes Hummels away with a forward run, leaving Vecino to fill in the secondary wave of attack and score the 2nd goal.
Dortmund did manage to turn it on in the remaining 4 minutes of the half, mostly using wide overloads with Götze. Their best chances came to Thorgan Hazard: first a shot off a Schulz cross, then from a great Götze lob sandwiched between a Witsel long-range effort.