First of all, congrats to Borussia. They gave us a lesson in football in the second half. It's really difficult to find the causes of such a dramatic turnaround, but I would say it's been their tempo that fucked us over. For whatever reason, the first 45 minutes were played at the rhythm that suited us best. They were slow and ultimately ineffective in their circulation, always allowing us to set and tighten up our defence in protection of our goal, while at the same time leaving us too much space to break through in transition. They created a few dangerous situations, but only Hakimi (who - along with Sancho - would later lead the second half charge) seemed to be playing with the necessary urgency.
Being 2-0 down at home at halftime, they were naturally expected to start strong in the second half in search for the goal that would put them back into the game. I knew it, you all knew it, everybody at Dortmund knew it. Unfortunately the final 45 (plus injury time) of tonight's game confirmed three things.
a) Our team's fortunes depend heavily on its ability to outrun the opponents. We can scrape through against lesser (in terms of quality) enemies, but of course it get much tougher as you raise the bar. As I wrote above, Borussia upped the tempo of their game big time in the second half, and we were completely unable to keep up with them. They kept moving the ball around so quickly, leaving our players to chase their shadows, until they find the way to break through our defensive line. Repeatedly. Seriously, it was a no contest. They allowed us back into the game only when they found their third and decided to cool things down a bit. Certainly, the tiredness of which we've been talking in the past few weeks played its part, yet it can't in any way justify such a dismal performance.
b) related to the previous point, we are incapable of (very poor at) managing the lead. We're a decent chuck of games into the season now, and it seems clear to me that no matter how many goals of advantage we take, we have this uncanny ability to allow the other team to creep their way back into the game. Sassuolo, Brescia, Sampdoria... these are all games that we were cruising (well, not the Brescia one, but we were still 2-0 up at one point), but eventually ended up winning narrowly. Now, I realise that when your opponent is literally running over you it's hard to keep a cool head, but there's suffering and then there's throwing yourself at the enemy's mercy. Aside from gifting them the equaliser, we kept turning balls over, which only helped them increase the pressure on our defence until we capitulated.
I won't even bother thinking of the possible combinations that would see us through the group because, as things stand, we need a miracle. By the way, if we take tonight's performance (the full 90 minutes) as an indicator, I would say that Borussia are likely to make more points than us in the remaining two fixtures, let alone lose they 3 points lead.
All in all, the good note remain the performance of the first half (even though, paradoxically, it would have hurt less had we played like shit for the whole game) and Sensi's return. All the rest was rubbish.