Bundesliga
Reus: "Being top at halfway doesn't mean much"
Borussia Dortmund captain Marco Reus helped his side secure top spot for the winter break of the 2018/19 Bundesliga season on Matchday 15, but the BVB star knows it won’t mean anything unless the table looks the same come May.
“As a footballer, of course you want to win every game,” Reus said speaking to bundesliga.com after Dortmund’s 2-1 win over Werder Bremen on Saturday.
“Being top halfway through the season is a nice side note, but it doesn’t mean much if you’re not top of the table at the end of the season. We’ll have to wait and see.”
Waiting and seeing is not something Dortmund have done so far this season. The club’s record unbeaten start to a Bundesliga campaign has been stretched to 15 games, with only two games sitting between BVB and a first-ever Hinrunde [first half of a season] without defeat.
Reus scored his tenth goal of the season during the win at home to Bremen, with a helpful hand from Jadon Sancho, while Paco Alcacer, making only his fourth start of the season, steered in the first and his 11th of the season from just 439 minutes of action.
“The team is great and without them all, this wouldn’t be possible,” Reus said. “The same goes for Alcacer and Sancho, it’s only as a collective where we succeed. I’m very, very happy with how it’s going right now, but you have to keep working so that it stays that way.”
Thomas Delaney was facing his former club, and despite his new side's record start to the season, he spoke on behalf of the rest of the squad to say that they are not satisfied with what they have right now.
“I’d be lying if I said we’re not happy with where we are at the moment,” Delaney told bundesliga.com. “But we’re not 100 per cent happy yet. We have to keep on working to get in that state of mind."
The last time Dortmund topped the table during a winter break was in 2010/11, and the black-and-yellows went on to lift the first of two consecutive league titles under Jürgen Klopp in that season.
Lucien Favre’s side could still go into the second half of the season with only a six-point lead ahead of Bayern Munich or Borussia Mönchengladbach. With Dortmund facing Fortuna Düsseldorf in midweek before hosting Gladbach on Matchday 17, as Reus says, it’s all about working to keep things as they are for BVB.