Borussia Dortmund defender Mats Hummels expressed his dismay at the manner in which his team were beaten by Rangers in the first leg of their Europa League knockout round play-off at Signal Iduna Park on Thursday.
The Bundesliga outfit lost 4-2 to the champions of Scotland, finding themselves 4-1 down after 54 minutes before Raphael Guerreiro fired a late goal back to add to Jude Bellingham s earlier effort.
Marco Rose s men were all over the place at the back, with a James Tavernier penalty and Alfredo Morelos goal giving them a 2-0 half-time lead, before John Lundstram made it three and a Dan-Axel Zagadou own goal restored the three-goal cushion after Bellingham briefly reduced the deficit.
Hummels was far from happy after the game, lamenting the way he and his team-mates conceded the goals, having shipped five in their previous home game against Bayer Leverkusen, which ended in a 5-2 defeat.
The 2014 World Cup winner said to RTL after the defeat: If you look at the Leverkusen game, we conceded four goals after unnecessarily losing the ball. That happened with the first, second and fourth goals here. I think we know what our problem is. The coach mentions it often enough.
We re playing an awful lot of nonsensical football, a lot of illogical football and making our opponents so strong.
Our football is also too complicated. If we play this way, we ll sometimes win and sometimes lose but over the piece, we won t have success.
This was the first time Dortmund have conceded four goals at home in a European game since their 8-4 win against Legia Warsaw in the Champions League in 2016.
4 Rangers are the first Scottish team to score four away goals against a German side (4-2 vs Borussia Dortmund) in European competition since Hibernian won 4-0 at Rot-Weiss Essen in what was the only the fourth ever European Cup match back in September 1955. Overdue.
— OptaJoe (@OptaJoe)
Rangers boss Giovanni van Bronckhorst was understandably beaming with pride after a famous European night for his team, though he acknowledged that there is plenty of work still to be done in next Thursday s second leg at Ibrox.
It s a very good result for us against a quality team, a big team in Europe, he said. We wanted to take a result back with us to Glasgow to get a good game next week.
I think we achieved that with the two goal difference we take back and I m really proud of the performance the players have shown.
We also know we re only halfway and there s still one game to be played but to come here and score four away goals in Europe is a very good achievement, so I m more than happy with the result, and especially the performance.
