When you picture breaking a drought and scoring a first Bundesliga goal for more than five months, you almost certainly don’t picture this. Barren runs are rarely broken by moments of supreme confidence and swagger and if Timo Werner required the proverbial one that trickled in after hitting him on the backside, he didn’t get it.
Found by a typically surgical Xavi Simons pass, he skated around Moritz Nicolas, but the goalkeeper’s half-hand on the ball would have been enough to put many an attacker off. Not Werner. He composed himself in the blink of an eye and smashed into the net from an unforgiving angle.
That, as the only goal of the game, was enough for Leipzig to take victory at Borussia Mönchengladbach, not always a happy hunting ground for Marco Rose’s team. After 736 goalless minutes stretching back into spring, Werner must have longed for this moment, but there was no explosion of joy, anger or … anything. There was just a little patting down of the right hand to indicate calm and, with the 27-year-old opting out of media interviews for the moment, no further explanation. “I think he’s extremely happy inside,” suggested teammate Kevin Kampl.
Werner’s demeanour suggested that this was just a moment, not a denouement. Having been cast aside – for now at least – by the national team with Euro 2024 on the horizon and his status at Leipzig challenged, he is taking the high road. After starting a fifth successive game on the bench, there was perhaps no other way. “It’s not an easy situation for him,” said Rose after Saturday’s game, “but it’s important that he accepts it.” Words which, chosen carefully, suggest Werner is right to be circumspect. He is still in the foothills of the mountain.
Brought back from Chelsea last year to eventually (re)take over from Christopher Nkunku – who has coincidentally moved in the opposite direction – the club’s record goalscorer has not quite shone as before. Partly because of the dented confidence he brought back from Stamford Bridge, but partly because Leipzig have changed. This summer’s unplanned rebuild has worked against him too. Leipzig have been run this season by Simons and the burgeoning talent of Loïs Openda. If Dani Olmo wasn’t currently out injured, he would be in the creative mix too. Benjamin Šeško is chipping in with goals too, and Christoph Baumgartner will be up to speed soon.
It doesn’t leave much room for Werner but they needed him here, and he delivered. Yet for once the forward – so often the target of hostility from opposing fans since leaving hometown club Stuttgart for Leipzig in 2016 – wasn’t the lightning rod, even if he was the one to apply a full stop to the discussion.
Max Eberl, the club’s sporting director, was returning to Gladbach for the first time since leaving last year after almost 23 years of continuous service as player and director. Eberl, who turned 50 last week, described “nerves” at going back to Borussia-Park, though he emphasised those “dissipated relatively quickly because I received a lot of positive feedback. A lot of people thanked me and were happy to see me again.” Yet the club itself, which he left for health reasons, was never the issue. The fans’ reaction to his departure, and particularly to his subsequent arrival at Leipzig (the home ultras were silent for the first 20 minutes here in an anti-Red Bull protest) was always what made things awkward for Eberl. He was heckled when he took his seat and a particularly distasteful banner, depicting him as a pig with a sick note in his hand, was unfurled in the Nord Kurve.
Eberl shouldn’t have had to go through that. But he, and Leipzig, showed they are heading into a new era, one in which they can be tough as well as stylish. For now Werner has come to represent that, even if it a role he doesn’t want to be stuck with for long.
Stuttgart 3-1 Darmstadt, Werder Bremen 2-1 Cologne, Mönchengladbach 0-1 Leipzig, Augsburg 2-1 Mainz, Dortmund 1-0 Wolfsburg, Bayern Munich 7-0 Bochum, Union Berlin 0-2 Hoffenheim, Eintracht Frankfurt 0-0 Freiburg, Leverkusen 4-1 Heidenheim
Talking points
• If there was any doubt over how hard Germany has fallen for Harry Kane, it was washed away in the space of a Saturday afternoon against Bayern Munich’s perennial whipping boys Bochum. The England captain was, by some distance, man of the match in the champions’ 7-0 win, scoring his first Bundesliga hat-trick and chipping in a pair of assists for good measure. Kane showed, as Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Philipp Schneider wrote, “how he can use his seniority to pull an attack that was still immature last year into footballing adulthood”. He did what he does in a slightly different shape authored by Thomas Tuchel, this time in a two with Eric-Maxim Choupo-Moting, who scored the opener – and how Kane made both the Cameroonian and young Mathys Tel, who also scored later on, look better.
• What Kane is still not, however, is Bundesliga top scorer. That remains Serhou Guirassy, who scored twice in Stuttgart’s 3-1 win over Darmstadt to hit the 10-goal mark after just five games, a feat only achieved before in the league by Robert Lewandowski (the Pole’s starting pace in his record 41-goal season of 2020-21). That the Guinean is doing it at all is something; that he is able to do so for Stuttgart is remarkable. When coach Sebastian Hoeness praised Guirassy for “the entire range” of his game and of his goals, of all types, he hit the nail on the head.
• Pushing Guirassy and Kane is Victor Boniface, who again shone with a brace in Leverkusen’s 4-1 win over Darmstadt, in which he struck twice to move to six goals. “I didn’t expect this,” said the forward of his rapid start to life in Germany, with his team in second and level on points with Bayern.
• After another difficult week in which they gave an anaemic performance in their Champions League defeat at Paris Saint-Germain, veteran Marco Reus was restored to the Borussia Dortmund starting line-up – and bailed out his spluttering side with the second-half winner against Wolfsburg, concluding a rare piece of collective excellence. “We need to make these small steps and the rest will come,” said Reus, who is showing the leadership that some argued was missing when he was team captain.
• Union Berlin’s four defeats in a row doesn’t truly tell the story of their season. Wednesday’s heartbreaking but proud late loss at Real Madrid, for example, was almost an achievement. With that said, they were rotten in Saturday’s 2-0 defeat at home to Hoffenheim – Urs Fischer called their first-half display “a non-performance” – and it underlined the new world of pressure and expectation they inhabit. So there was little sympathy on offer either for Leonardo Bonucci, at fault for both the visitors’ first-half goals, despite the 36-year-old having had no real pre-season due to his dispute with Juventus.
• Three cheers though for Naby Keïta, who finally made his Werder Bremen debut in the closing minutes of the Saturday Top-Spiel win over Köln after suffering injury in pre-season – and almost sneaked himself a first goal in his cameo. After the recent exit of Niclas Füllkrug, the win – and Keïta’s well-received bow – were huge boosts to coach Ole Werner.
| Pos | Team | P | GD | Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bayern Munich | 5 | 14 | 13 |
| 2 | Bayer Leverkusen | 5 | 11 | 13 |
| 3 | Stuttgart | 5 | 10 | 12 |
| 4 | RB Leipzig | 5 | 10 | 12 |
| 5 | Hoffenheim | 5 | 6 | 12 |
| 6 | Borussia Dortmund | 5 | 4 | 11 |
| 7 | Wolfsburg | 5 | 1 | 9 |
| 8 | Eintracht Frankfurt | 5 | 1 | 7 |
| 9 | Freiburg | 5 | -5 | 7 |
| 10 | Union Berlin | 5 | 0 | 6 |
| 11 | Werder Bremen | 5 | -2 | 6 |
| 12 | Augsburg | 5 | -4 | 5 |
| 13 | Heidenheim | 5 | -4 | 4 |
| 14 | VfL Bochum | 5 | -12 | 3 |
| 15 | Borussia M'gladbach | 5 | -5 | 2 |
| 16 | Cologne | 5 | -5 | 1 |
| 17 | Darmstadt | 5 | -10 | 1 |
| 18 | Mainz | 5 | -10 | 1 |
