Three Questions in Baku: Dortmund's Goal Drought, a Midfield Without Emre Can, and the Trap of the Easy Fixture

There was tiredness on the faces of the Borussia Dortmund players as they came off the plane in Baku, and behind it something more calculating. Three away matches in seven days, one of them reached by a five-hour flight, is a schedule nobody enjoys. Yet the number that gets buried whenever everyone starts talking about fatigue is the scoreline: no goals in the last two games. A 1-0 defeat away at Bodo/Glimt, then a 0-0 at home to Union Berlin. Dortmund sit 18th of 36 in the Champions League league-phase table, with three points from two matches. Niko Kovac did not dress it up in his press conference. We have not found the final-third patterns in the last two games, he said.

In the new format, 36 clubs share one table and each plays eight different opponents. Sliding into the lower half after two matches makes every remaining calculation heavier. Dortmund now face Sabah FC — the Azerbaijani champions, energised at home, a side who beat Slavia Prague 2-0 in their previous league-phase fixture. Kovac called Dortmund the clear favourites; Sabah coach Dambrauskas called them one of the biggest teams in the world. Put the two sentences side by side and the dramatic frame of the match is clear: a global brand on one side, a confident underdog in its own stadium on the other.

The injury list is the biggest story of this fixture, even if it rarely makes the headline. Emre Can is out — the midfield screen and the long-passing outlet are both missing at once. The attacking midfielders Karetsas and Konstantelias are also unavailable. Three away games in seven days, a five-hour flight, and a coach talking about fresh legs: rotation is coming. This is where the first tension appears.

I have followed teams through airports, but the loudest arrivals happen in living rooms. I did not go to Russia for the 2026 World Cup; I watched every match in a community hall in Sylhet with three hundred people. The night Belgium went 2-0 down to Japan and later lost 3-2 to Belgium after leading — the room burst open and collapsed in the same breath. What I learned that night is that supporters do not speak in tactical language; they keep accounts in feeling. Dortmund's goalless run reaches those rooms in a different tongue, as worry rather than as statistics.

Kovac's phrasing deserves a close reading. He said the final-third patterns have not been found. That is a complaint about chance creation, not about missed finishes, and the difference is enormous. If two goalless games are a finishing failure, the cure is a striker's confidence; if they are a creation failure, the cure lies in the whole build-up structure. Kovac points at the second problem while prescribing something that sounds like the first.

His prescription — play faster, play more accurately, shoot more often — is an instruction about tempo and efficiency, not about structure. It assumes the system is sound and only the execution is missing, and that a weaker opponent will unlock the patterns by itself. That is a bet. Patterns do not return because the opponent is weak; they return when the opponent is forced to give you space. Sabah have no intention of giving Dortmund space in Baku.

This is where Can's absence strikes twice. He was the shield in front of the back line and the first outlet for long passes. Without him the natural drift is towards a more conservative double pivot, which slows ball progression further. The very slowness Kovac is complaining about may be worsened by Can's injury — that is the most uncomfortable possibility in this fixture.

The second tension sits in rotation. Fresh legs are needed, no doubt. But the problem the coach himself identified — patterns not found — is not solved by new legs; it is solved by the same eleven standing in the same places often enough to make connections automatic. Change the front line and the final-third links have to be built from zero again. The medicine for fatigue may feed the disease.

How the opponent reads Dortmund matters. Dambrauskas said they are so fast in the press. Dortmund's threat lives in transition pressing and verticality, not in patient possession. If Sabah sit deep, hold a compact block and counter into the space behind, Dortmund's main weapon is half-neutralised. The 2-0 win over Slavia Prague is therefore not a fluke result; it is evidence that this setup works at this level.

One limitation should be stated plainly. This preview supplies no xG and no PPDA figures, and PPDA — passes allowed per defensive action — is the number that tells you how aggressive a press really is. Without that data nobody can say proportionally whether Dortmund's problem is systemic or simply variance. The coach's own language leans systemic. A data gap is not a licence to guess; it is a licence to place the question correctly — in Baku, the first measurement is how often Dortmund enter the box in the opening twenty minutes. Box entries and completed final-third passes will say more than raw shot counts.

The dressing room looks calm. Defender Daniel Svensson's line — I prepare the same way for every game, ready for whoever plays — is the model professional answer, and it carries no complaint about rotation. Kovac is running front-foot media management: by naming the problem himself, he lifts direct blame off his players. That kind of language at a press conference usually appears when a coach privately fears a flat performance.

The structural arithmetic of European football is tangled in this too. When a club like Sabah beats a side like Slavia Prague in the league phase, the coefficient of a smaller federation gains, and its argument in the next round of reform talks gets louder. Dortmund's arithmetic runs the other way: a low league-phase finish puts both prize money and market pool at risk. This report contains no figures for that ledger, so only the direction can be marked here, not the size.

The storm in the headline comes from editorial framing, not from the data. Turning two goalless games into a crisis is a form of expectation management in which the sample size and the certainty do not match. Declaring a system dead after two matches is exactly as hasty as declaring a crisis over after one win. In more than forty years of watching matches from the stands and from a screen, I have seen the same thing repeatedly: the story built around a goal drought grows faster than the problem itself.

The second contrarian angle is subtler. Everyone says Dortmund's problem is scoring; Kovac's own account says the problem is arriving. Those two problems take different medicine. A scoring problem demands better shot quality; an arrival problem demands faster build-up. When the coach says faster, more accurate, more shots, he is pointing at tempo and precision rather than changing the shape. It is a statement of belief that a weaker opponent will make the structure work on its own. Baku is where that belief gets tested.

The third angle comes from the other bench. Dambrauskas said the drought makes Dortmund even more dangerous. From an underdog coach that is a familiar device — casting his own team as the hunter and loading the pressure onto the favourite. At the same time, Kovac's clear-favourites framing lowers the expectation bar: now any kind of win will do, and nobody will ask about the quality of the performance. That is the language of a side short on confidence.

I think of that community hall in Sylhet in 2026. The fan zone was not a crowd; it was a heartbeat with a thousand faces. Nobody there knew what xG meant, nobody knew Dortmund's position in the table. They knew one feeling — we are not scoring. That feeling becomes the headline later. The analyst's job is to read it before the headline exists.

Three pressures converge here. The drought is a structural weakness, not a rumour. The injuries hit spine and creativity at the same time. The schedule offers three away games in seven days and a five-hour flight. Each is manageable alone; together they raise the odds of a flat performance. Add Sabah's confidence, built on a win over a solid European opponent.

The first twenty minutes in Baku will tell us which way the story turns. If Dortmund get into the box early, the drought narrative disappears in one match. If Sabah sit deep and Dortmund pass sideways, a third goalless game changes the vocabulary from a bad spell to a crisis. At sixty I still pack a notebook for the match, because memory needs a witness. In Baku the witness will be the scoreboard.