Dortmund fury after Uefa forces them to play on
Germans hit out as they are told by text message that match will go ahead on day after bomb attack
There would be no chances taken this time. Borussia Dortmund’s team bus, roughly 22 hours after its windows had been blown out in a bomb plot of precise, ghastly orchestration, was not about to stop for anybody.
It made the journey from Brackel training ground to Signal-Iduna Park at a lightning clip, led by three police outriders and not even stopping for red lights as it crossed a main road. Such were the imperatives for a club still trying to make some sense, indeed any sense at all, of the grotesque act perpetrated against it.
Many of those wearing Borussia’s bumblebee colours felt that last night’s hastily rearranged Champions League quarter-final was a burden too far.
Marc Bartra, their star centre-back, lay in hospital with his right-arm in a fulllength cast after being showered in shards of glass. Roman Burki, the goalkeeper who had been sitting next to the Spaniard, was in no fit state to focus on the game.
A 3-2 home defeat to Monaco did feel fleetingly like an escape. Under heavy Westphalian skies, a hope endured that football could, through the endless see-sawing changes of this match, palliate the horrors of the night before.
But questions over this rushed restaging would not recede. After all, the 11 young men who took to the field last night had, quite clearly, been the subject of a murder attempt. Now they were expected to work out the intricacies of marking Kylian Mbappé as if it had never happened? Little wonder they trailed 2-0 at half-time, or that manager Thomas Tuchel was enraged, suggesting that the match represented a selfish and exploitative ruse by Uefa suits in Nyon. “We were told by text message that the decision had been made in Switzerland,” he said. “When they told us, ‘you’re up tomorrow’, we felt completely ignored. They treated it as if a beer can had been thrown at the bus. This gives you feeling of impotence, that we have to keep functioning and nothing else matters. But football is not the most important thing in the world.” Uefa’s intransigence reflected a perverse logic, especially when both sides had gaps in their schedule next week, to give Dortmund players time to heal psychologically. In the circumstances, Dortmund performed superbly, hitting back at Monaco’s relentless attacks through goals from Ousmane Dembélé and Shinji Kagawa. And yet a sense of inappropriateness lingered, a suspicion that cold matters of logistics had trumped concerns for a team who could not possibly believe assurances that they were safe. Just how disorientated they felt was spelt out in stark terms by Nuri Sahin, who came on as a second-half substitute. “It’s hard to talk about it, to find the right