The final goal scored in front of Borussia Dortmund’s “yellow wall” in 2018 was a vital and a fitting one. When Marco Reus slid in at the back post to knock in the winner against Borussia Mönchengladbach, it gave his team some valuable peace of mind at the end of a year that has finally given some to him.

It all came together quite beautifully on Friday night. With the visitors occupying second place and having closed the gap at the top to six points with their midweek victory over Nürnberg and BVB’s loss at lowly Fortuna Düsseldorf, the pressure was on even more than had been anticipated. Dortmund knocked on the door fairly insistently from the off, but it was the sudden withdrawal of their top scorer, Paco Alcácer, with a muscle injury just after the half-hour mark that really kickstarted things.

Jadon Sancho’s dazzling finish helps Dortmund bounce back from defeat Read more

Mario Götze was introduced in the Spaniard’s stead, and put Reus in more familiar territory. The pair have been on wildly oscillating trajectories in recent years: both have been in and out of the Germany team, with Götze going to Bayern Munich and back as well as through a raft of tests for illness. Here, they were just two best friends hitting it off like in the old days.

For Jadon Sancho’s opener, Reus sped down the left, played the ball into Götze – holding it up all evening with a surety that any centre-forward would be proud of – who in turn fed it in for the young Englishman to drill in from a tricky angle. For the winner, Götze picked up the ball on the right from Sancho and, as he took it forward, quickly read what Reus wanted. The latter said that he knew “Mario would be thinking exactly the same as me and that he’d play it in towards the back post.” The lunging, poked finish was the goal that Dortmund needed at the end of a tricky week, with Gladbach and – more ominously – Bayern breathing down their necks.

As BVB have soared at the top of the table this has been, as Ruhr Nachrichten’s Florian Groeger wrote, “the best Hinrunde [first half of the season] of Reus’ career”. Clearly the two things are connected, but the forward’s triumph has been more than that. This is set to be only the second season in the last five that Reus has reached the mark of 20 Bundesliga starts (touch wood, with 17 down already), which underlines just how much frustration he has endured. His image as the Peter Pan of German football, for ever immortalised on the cover of Fifa, is gilded by just how much football he has missed. That he returns every time in prime form, as if he’s never been away, only adds to that sense of talent in suspended animation.

It will shock some to learn that Reus will be 30 in May. He had finished 2016-17 well but shortly after winning his first major trophy with the club, the DfB Pokal in Thomas Tuchel’s last match in charge, news emerged that he had ruptured cruciate knee ligaments in the final. He later spoke of breaking down in tears in the days that followed the diagnosis. “I would give away all the money to be healthy again,” he told GQ in October 2017. “To be able to do my job.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marco Reus and Mario Götze combined for Dortmund’s winner. Photograph: Leon Kuegeler/Reuters

Since that autumn of knuckling down backstage, Reus has succeeded in that and plenty more. He made his comeback from injury in February’s win against Hamburg, and since then has started 28 times in the Bundesliga and scored 18 times. His contributions were vital at the back end of a fractious last term, seen out under the stewardship of Peter Stöger, as BVB scraped into the Champions League. This season, reunited with Lucien Favre – the coach who managed him at Gladbach – he has grown further as Dortmund’s newly appointed captain, leader and spokesperson.

He rarely ducks the microphones after the game, and he speaks with candour. It was Reus who came out after the defeat at Fortuna and told journalists that “we deserved to lose” and “we have to learn from this”. Reus’ current confidence is a big part of Dortmund’s resplendent form. Even with Bayern threatening to flex their financial muscles this winter, there is little of the trepidation that there might have been in the past. The skipper signed a new five-year deal in March, less than a month after returning to first-team action.

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It’s the contract that he signed back in February 2015 that continues to endear Reus to the Dortmund faithful, though. While some sections of the support are still sore over Götze’s defection to Bayern in 2013 (many others adore him, it must be pointed out), Reus enjoys unequivocal adulation, much tied to him extending his deal and removing a buyout clause with Dortmund mired in an unfamiliar relegation fight. The situation, in the closing months of the Jürgen Klopp reign, was serious enough that Hans-Joachim Watzke felt it necessary to point out that there was no release clause in the event of BVB going down.

Watzke said at the time that Reus could define a Dortmund era, “like Uwe Seeler did at Hamburg or Steven Gerrard at Liverpool”. He could do exactly that by leading a team that finished the job in the second half of this season. Even with Bayern ready to fight for their title, it is clear that if Reus should maintain his fitness, Dortmund have an outstanding chance.

Talking points

Bayern have made it clear this week, however, that they won’t be throwing in the towel. “We’re back,” said Niko Kovac, who returned to Eintracht Frankfurt and saw his team win 3-0, the excellent Franck Ribéry leading the way with a brace. Karl-Heinz Rummenigge was full of praise for the Frenchman, though did not go as far as pledging a new contract – but the 35-year-old admitted with a grin he did ask in the dressing-room afterwards.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Franck Ribery struck twice against Eintracht Frankfurt. Photograph: Pixathlon/Rex/Shutterstock

It has been a good year for Eintracht though, as shown by the sporting director, Fredi Bobic – described as “unpretentious, open, confident, clear, opinionated and purposeful” by Jogi Löw – being named as Kicker magazine’s man of the year.