Next Friday, 29th of August 2014, Borussia Dortmund will travel to Bavaria to measure forces with Augsburg at the SGL arena on what will be the opening match of the second round of Bundesliga.

The German Super Cup winners, Borussia Dortmund, have had a fairly slow start at the 2014-15 edition of the Bundesliga as they were defeated at home by a considerably inspired Bayer Leverkusen. The visitors got a very early lead thanks to a goal by Karim Bellarabi before the clock reached the first minute of the match. Such impressive start from Bayer Leverkusen has somewhat restrained the Dortmund team from displaying their usual game, as they looked completely lost especially during the first-half of the match. After the break, the home side managed to impose a different rhythm to the match as they piled on the pressure on Leverkusen’s defence line, but despite all their firing power, BVB failed to deliver the final blow and to offer the visitor’s goalkeeper, Bernd Leno, a proper challenge.

Jürgen Klopp experimented with a wide 4-3-3 style in the first-half, with Marco Reus and Aubameyang supporting the team’s only centre forward, the Italian sharpshooter Ciro Immobile, but such approach proved to be ineffective, particularly due to the lack of communication between the team’s sectors and the large amount of failed passes. On the second half, the team seemed to have returned to their usual 4-2-3-1 style for a while but it was an overall poor performance from the home side.

For the match against Augsburg next Friday, Jürgen Klopp, who still has to deal with a considerable number of injured players, will certainly rally the troops in order to make them aware that they need to do much better if they want to be title contenders and not let Bayern Munich escape such early in the season.

As for Augsburg, they are certainly not happy with their season’s start as well, since they were defeated during their always complicated travel to Hoffenheim. The boys from Markus Weinzierl were faced with several difficulties to impose their game and their 2-0 defeat didn’t come as a surprise. Augsburg presented their usual 4-2-3-1 formation and although they had several attempts on goal they never seemed to be able to react to the couple of goals they allowed in just two minutes.

For the match against Dortmund, Markus Weinzierl will have several headaches on the injury department as it is still not likely that he will be able to count on the contribution of Bance, Bobadilla, Moravek, Gelios and Esswein.

When both sides met at Augsburg last season, Dortmund pulled rank and smashed the home team by 4-0. Despite their defeat at home on the first match of the season, Dortmund are firm favourites to win the next Friday’s match.

Augsburg

Stats: W-2 L-2 D-1

Recent Form - LLDWW

Borussia Dortmund

Stats: W-3 L-2 D-0

Recent Form - LWWLW

Possible Line-ups

Augsburg (4-2-3-1) - Hitz - Verhaegh - Klavan - Callsen-Bracker - Baba - Baier - Feulner - Caiuby - Altintop - Werner - Matavz

Borussia Dortmund (4-2-3-1) - Weidenfeller - Piszczek - Subotic - Sokratis - Erik Durm - Kehl - Jojic - Mkhitaryan - Reus - Aubameyang - Immobile

Prediction

Augsburg 0 Borussia Dortmund 2