It is rare for a single player to be challenged and celebrated by Dortmund’s huge south stand. There was something iconic when Borussia Dortmund’s club idol Marco Reus was summoned in front of the “Süd” after the 5-1 gala against the pitiful FC Augsburg. He was visibly moved and repeatedly raised his arms to the 25,000 people and thanked him for his success for several minutes previous career was paid homage.
“Indescribable. Nothing can replace that,” the 34-year-old former national player later stammered about this moment, which visibly affected him. After the season, the 35-year-old exceptional player will leave his favorite club after twelve years to end his career abroad. Reus had already announced this on Friday. “A joint decision,” said Dortmund’s sports director Sebastian Kehl, and BVB coach Edin Terzic noted: “Unfortunately I don’t have a stopwatch, a remote control that prevents him from turning 35 at the end of the month.”
Former captain delivers
But they really wanted to give him this moment in front of the south stand. Against Augsburg, the noble technician was allowed to start a Bundesliga game for the first time in almost two months. Despite the XXL rotation, with which Terzic spared most of the regular staff for the Champions League clash on Tuesday in the semi-final second leg at Paris Saint-Germain, the entire team was highly motivated to give Reus a special game. And the ex-captain delivered.
“Everything he did with the ball was top class,” enthused Terzic, who spoke full of pathos and was also visibly and audibly moved about a special player after the game. With one goal and two assists, Reus was named player of the game. The expressions of love from the 80,000 people for one, according to Kehl, “of the greatest players that BVB has produced” increased during the game, with Reus’ planned substitution after just over an hour and just after the game in front of the south stand.
“I never thought that in my career I would experience a game like this where the fans would honor you like that,” said Reus on ZDF. “He absolutely deserves that. It’s a unique story in modern football. That someone gives himself so much for a club,” said Terzic later pathetically and also declared him “one of the best in the world.”
Both aspects of Terzic’s comments were of course somewhat exaggerated. The truth is not only that Reus only won the DFB Cup twice in his twelve years, but never the championship with BVB and also didn’t win any titles with the national team. In the world championship year of 2014, he was injured, as he was too often in his career. In addition, in his comments about the Dortmund native, who “spent over 20 years at the club”, Terzic omitted the fact that Reus had of course once been discarded in his youth and had to be bought back by Borussia Mönchengladbach in 2012 for 17 million euros.
Reus wants to go to Wembley
It is one of the great achievements of Reus’s title-poor career that he is revered as a legend not only in Dortmund, but also in Mönchengladbach. Even on the Lower Rhine, he is still considered one of the best players of the modern era for the other Borussia.
Now, in the winter of his career, Reus has another chance to achieve something very special and to diminish the agonizing realization that a lot more would have been possible in his career. “I would like the Marco Reus Festival to continue,” said Terzic, who expressly wasn’t just referring to the rest of his Bundesliga farewell tour. BVB is very motivated to give Reus another Champions League final.
“A circle would close there too,” said Terzic before the semi-final second leg in Paris, where Dortmund have the chance to reach the final at Wembley after a 1-0 win in the first leg, as they did in Reus’s first professional season at BVB in 2013 . “That would be the perfect setting for him to go there again,” said Terzic.
But Reus has long been thinking further and bigger. Looking at the celebrating BVB fans, he said: “I hope that we will see that on June 1st at Wembley and then hopefully we will have even more reason to celebrate. That would definitely be the crowning achievement.”
