Seven games, seven points, 13th place in the Bundesliga - Borussia Dortmund have got stuck in the starting blocks. In an interview with German football magazine kicker, BVB chairman Hans-Joachim Watzke talked about “an accumulation of mishaps which have led to us not working perfectly.”

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Das vollständige Watzke-Interview gibt es in der Donnerstag-Ausgabe des kicker-Sportmagazins

On the start of the season:

“I don’t want to gloss over or trivialize it, it was absolutely unsatisfactory. Seven points from seven games is not what we want. But if you take into account that we’ve been affected by the World Cup more than any other team, that we’ve been going through an unbelievable injury crisis and that we’ve had to change our style a bit after the departure of Robert Lewandowski, it might at least partially explain our results.”

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… on how the club’s dealing with the current situation:

“If you go on from one success to another for years you have to be prepared for setbacks. We are dealing with it and are recharging our batteries for the tasks ahead. Despite 13th place, we are staying calm and carry on. We’ve gone through similar slumps before and we’ve always managed to get out of it.”

… on the target for the season:

“We want to qualify directly for the Champions League and I'm convinced that we will succeed.”

… on the team’s character:

“We don’t need to talk about quality, and also not about attitude. It’s not that the players don’t want. We cover almost or more than 120 kilometres in every game, but we don’t get rewarded for our commitment. We don’t lack quality or attitude, we just need to get our form, stability, automatisms and confidence back.”

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… on the return of the injured players:

“Some of our players can make good use of the break, above all Ilkay Gündogan, Marco Reus, Oliver Kirch or Henrikh Mkhitaryan, but also Neven Subotic, Kevin Grosskreutz and Sven Bender. The two weeks between the Hamburg and Cologne games will do us good.”