November 2012
A busy month
November saw eight fixtures including two in the Champion's League.
The first fixture of the month saw us entertain Furth at the Westfalenstadion and for them to gift us with an early own goal from Mavraj. The match was uneventful with Gotze grabbing an extra goal at the death of the match.
Four days later the squad faced the trip to the beautiful city of St Petersburg to play the big spending Zenit. The match began badly for us when Piszczek decided the best way to defend a corner was to push Bruno Alves over, Shirokov scored the resulting penalty. The match went from bad to worse with Kerzhakov scoring after 15 minutes. Lewandowski managed to score 3 minutes later but this was only a blip for Zenit. They went on to score four more, soundly thrashing us, we were played off the park. Kerzhakov even managed a hat trick, that's how bad we were.
Trying to bounce back
The next two matches saw us play Mainz at their home and host Freiburg.
Against Mainz we conceded in the 29th minute, with Subotic equalising ten minutes later. On the stroke of half time Piszczek again decided pushing someone over was how to defend and the resulting penalty kick was converted by Polanski. Lewandowski managed to get a goal back in the second half to secure us a solitary point for our travels.
The next match provided us with some joys as we beat a poor Freiburg side with a second string side, Schemlzer and Schieber grabbing the goals to secure the three points.
A poor end to the month
The month ended badly with only one point from four games. This bad run began with a comprehensive defeat at the Nou Camp. I was unsurprisingly dominated by Barca to put my Champion's League hopes to bed with a Busquets double either side of a Messi goal to finally eliminate us from the competition and leave us languishing at the bottom of Group H.
Next we had the task of travelling to Dusseldorf in a match we were expected to win, not least by myself. They hit us on the counter and defended brilliantly despite going down to ten men early on to take all three points in what could be a crucial victory for them in their fight against relegation.
In the match that followed we secured our only point of the run with a 2-2 draw against HSV, a Blaszczykowski goal followed by a Gundogan penalty securing a point against the strong Rothosen. The only positive here was a fight back from 2-0 down to secure a point.
The final match of the month saw us travel to league leaders Wolfsburg...we shouldn't have bothered. We were outplayed from start to finish with not a single positive to take from the performance.
All in all a poor month but we are still within a shot of the title and with some money in January/summer we should be able to challenge in Europe a bit better next season. Dzagoev joins in a month and if I can offload Perisic or Grosskreutz along with one of my current full backs I might be able to strengthen my defence a little.
Results
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Table
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