“Not for sale” - exactly ten years ago to the day after the averted insolvency, several hundred BVB fans replicated the silent march of those who took to the streets on 14th March 2005 for the survival of their club.

“If we are repeatedly stressing the fact that we will never forget where we come from, we are not just talking about 1909, not only about the venerable Borsigplatz – no, we are also talking about that crisis that caused despair amongst all Black and Yellow fans in the days of March 2015,” asserted Hans-Joachim Watzke. At that time, the survival of the club was hanging by a thread.

“Together,” Watzke reminisced, “the BVB family has achieved a great deal since then. The restructuring of the club has been successfully carried out, it has won the league twice, won the double, been in the final of the Champions League, is free of financial debt, and in the last few months has fought with a sense of cohesion, certainly unrivaled in Europe, through a gruelling sporting crisis.  Certainly, some of this combined strength that we show as BVB goes back to the days when we stood on the economic abyss”.

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Another piece of history: After the resounding premiere in the Dortmund “U”, BVB film “born on Borsigplatz” is now being staged in the Cinestar am Hauptbahnhof collection. The audience received it enthusiastically. 

With panache, BVB confidently cruised into the quarter-finals of the DFB Cup. In front of 30,500 spectators in a sold out Dresden Stadium, Ciro Immobile scored the goals in a 2-0 victory against the third division outfit. This was followed by two goalless draw in the league, at Hamburg SV and at home against 1. FC Kӧln. However, BVB then succeeded in claiming a 3-2 victory away to Hannover. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang gave BVB the lead and made it 3-1, with Shinji Kagawa scoring the other, making them unbeaten in their 7th league game in a row. This streak however was ended in the Champions League by a 3-0 defeat to Juventus. Marcel Schmelzer suffered a torn muscle fibre in this match, and became the fourth wing-back to be sidelined for the upcoming matches after Lukasz Piszczek, Erik Durm and Kevin Groβkreutz.

Ilkay Gündogan made his comeback to the international team in the 2-2 draw against Australia. A good one-and-a-half years after his last appearance for Germany, it came full circle for Gündogan. For Reus as well, who made it 1-0, it was a return to the national set-up after two serious injuries. He even scored two within a minute, the first however being ruled out for offside. On the bench were two more Borussia Dortmund players, Mats Hummels and Roman Weidenfeller.  

Boris Rupert