Götze on his Signal Iduna Park comeback: "I'm very, very happy right now"

The fans probably won't look back at Friday's clash with SC Freiburg in the same light in ten years' time, even though BVB emerged from the encounter as deserved 3-1 winners. For Götze, the match was a "highly emotional" occasion – after all, he was back in SIGNAL IDUNA PARK as a Dortmund player for the first time in exactly 1,248 days.

"Obviously there were one or two thoughts running through my head because I didn't know what it would be like. I have a lot of respect for what happened this evening," said Götze afterwards. At the end he could only declare that he was "very, very happy right now. It was simply a wonderful feeling to see how the spectators reacted, especially when I came off. That was a lovely moment for me." There was a round of warm applause from the stands when Götze left the field on 71 minutes, making way for Raphael Guerreiro – one of BVB's "young guns" who made their mark on the match against Freiburg.

"Suddenly what seemed like a certain victory became a close game"

Whether Guerreiro, Ousmane Dembélé, Emre Mor or Christian Pulisic, the youngsters have come up trumps in the last few weeks, one reason being because the Black and Yellows' chemistry is just right. Whichever member of Thomas Tuchel's team you ask these days, all the players will emphasise the incredible solidarity running through the ranks and the joy that it gives each individual player to be a cog in this well-oiled machine. Mario Götze is no exception in this respect: "It just gives me a lot of joy to be out there on the pitch with such footballers. You can see how much fun it is, but also how hard we work together. How we play the ball forward and have this desire to win at all costs and to score goals."

His coached concurred but also emphasised there was room for improvement in the performance against Sport-Club. "It took 15 minutes for us to get into the game," said Thomas Tuchel, who felt he had seen BVB "completely dominate" between then and the scoring of the second goal, creating "a series of good-quality chances. But after we went 2-0 up then we started to play the ball backwards far too often and let carelessness creep into our build-up play." That led to Freiburg pulling one back and a spell in which the match hung in the balance. "Suddenly what seemed like a certain victory became a close game," analysed Tuchel.

Mario Götze comes full circle…

It was an experience BVB were dealing with for the first time after their recent comfortable victories. "You could see it in our play," said Tuchel, who nevertheless drew the positives. "We haven't gone through a spell like that yet and this experience comes at the perfect time for us." What Tuchel means is that his charges emerged from this spell of pressure unscathed, before finally putting the game to bed with a third goal late on through Guerreiro to seal a 3-1 win. "After the big and comfortable wins we've had recently, this experience will help us. This feeling of having emerged unscathed from a difficult period in the game, especially when you are then rewarded with the positive experience of a goal at the end."

All in all, then, Borussia Dortmund can therefore learn some lessons for the future from this supposed weaker spell of the game. "We are on the right track, want to take each game as it comes and rack up the points," Mario Götze added before disappearing down into the changing rooms. The next match is Tuesday's clash with Real Madrid. Madrid? Sounds familiar, right? That was Mario Götze's last appearance over three years ago. The midfielder has come full circle.

Dennis-Julian Gottschlich