Dortmund 0–1 Schalke: A Piece Of Wembley At The Revier-Derby

The last match day con­tained the most elec­tri­fy­ing derby in the Bun­desliga – the so called “Revier-Derby”. It’s the matchup between Schalke 04 and Borus­sia Dort­mund. The repul­sion between these two teams is so strong, that the fans even use syn­onyms, when they talk about the oppos­ing team.

Dort­mund is called “Lüdenscheid-Nord” by the Schalke-supporters and the Borussia-fans only speak about “Herne-West”.

It was the 134th edi­tion of the “Revier-Derby” between these teams at the Signal-Iduna-Park in Dort­mund with 80.552 Spec­ta­tors. Both teams needed an ini­tial spark because of their mod­er­ate per­for­mances in the past games. Mainly Dort­mund needed a win to stop its down­ward trend.

Both teams played cau­tiously and defen­sively in the first min­utes of the match. Schalke ben­e­fited from their defen­sive play and gave Borus­sia lit­tle space to pro­duce effec­tive combinations.

But in the 26th minute of the match the Argen­tinean striker Lucas Bar­rios cre­ated the most con­tentious issue of the derby. The borus­sia striker hit the bar and the ball tripped of to the goal line – Goal or not??

- Ref­eree Stark imme­di­ately called the play­ers to go on and decided that the ball didn’t pass the goal line. This scene put every ger­man foot­ball fan in mind of the 30th of July 1966 when Geoff Hurst scored an irreg­u­lar goal for Eng­land in the world-cup final. In the Signal-Iduna-Park the Schalke-Fans could empha­size with the Eng­lish in 1966 about being lucky, because the TV-pictures proof, that the ball passed the line.

Schalke went ahead by a goal in the 31st minute of the first half scored by the peru­vian striker Jef­fer­son Far­fan. In the sec­ond half Dort­mund added up the pres­sure but they weren’t able to score the equal­izer. This per­for­mance showed the impor­tance of for­mer Borussia-striker Alexan­der Frei, who was trans­ferred to Basel at the begin­ning of the season.

Schalke played very orga­nized and gained the con­trol of the match. Only in the 65th minute, when Borussia-player Kevin Großkreutz was fouled by Vasil­ios Pli­at­sikas in the penalty-area, Schalke gave up its defen­sive struc­ture. Ref­eree Stark didn’t rec­og­nize the foul didn’t blow the whistle.

It was the sec­ond time that Borus­sia Dort­mund quar­relled with the referee’s decision.

In the last minute Ger­ald Asamoah, who was sent on for Halil Alt­in­top, shot frac­tion­ally wide and missed the sec­ond goal for Schalke.

With this splen­did vic­tory Schalke is now look­ing for­ward to attack the top of the stand­ings, whereas Borus­sia Dort­mund has to think about its demands being one of the top-teams in the Bundesliga.