The Bundesliga Preview Show - Matchday 2
Cologne - The Bundesliga Preview Show is the DFL Deutsche Fußball Liga's weekly TV programme, offering a global audience a unique perspective on Germany's top flight throughout the season. We have in-depth previews of the upcoming league action, exclusive interviews, behind-the-scenes reports, the best goals from the latest league encounters and much more besides.
Matchday Replay
Coming up this week on the Bundesliga Preview Show...
FC Bayern München got the defence of their title off to a successful start with a 2-1 victory over VfL Wolfsburg. World Cup winner bagged the first goal of the new league campaign to set the champions on course for three points against last season's fifth-place finishers. An even more impressive match-up on Saturday saw Borussia Dortmund go head-to-head with Bayer 04 Leverkusen, whose new coach Roger Schmidt certainly didn't have to wait long to celebrate his debut goal in the German top flight – supplying it in nine seconds flat, a new all-time Bundesliga record! Not far away from Dortmund's Signal Iduna Park, SC Paderborn made their own bit of history on Sunday and it fell to Elias Kachunga to score their first-ever goal at German football's top table.
FC Bayern Report
On the back of FC Bayern's pre-season Supercup defeat to Dortmund, head coach Pep Guardiola stressed that given the late start made to training by so many of the club's sizeable World Cup contingent, it would be some time yet before the team were operating in anything like top gear. The opening league victory over Wolfsburg was, he acknowledged, a definite step in the right direction but with another heavyweight encounter upcoming at FC Schalke 04 this weekend, the Catalan tactician is not as yet deviating from that anticipated timeline. Meanwhile, a few lucky employees of one of the Munich outfit's sponsors have enjoyed a privileged peek behind the scenes at a training session.
In Focus
He has of course been back on business a few times now since moving to Munich in the summer of 2011 but for Manuel Neuer, a return to his home town and the club where he matured into an international-class custodian will always be a bit special. The current world keeper of the year – a status he confirmed with his displays for Germany in Brazil – is renowned for his down-to-earth nature and, digging further, the roots of his character were nourished growing up in Gelsenkirchen and coming through the Royal Blue youth ranks. Neuer tells the Bundesliga Preview Show more about his formative years.
Spotlight
After his Supercup exploits against Bayern, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang had no such cause for celebrations, with or without his Spiderman mask, as Dortmund sank to a 2-0 home loss against Leverkusen on Matchday 1. Borussia will undoubtedly bounce back though, most likely sooner rather than later, and the French-born Gabon international is earmarked for a leading role in Jürgen Klopp's all-action forward department over the months ahead. With Robert Lewandowski now pulling on a Bayern shirt, Klopp is looking to Aubameyang to step up to the mark as BVB's 'senior' striker alongside newbies Ciro Immobile and Adrian Ramos, and build on a solid debut Bundesliga season of his own. The lightning-fast 25-year-old will be doing everything in his power to oblige.
All this, and much, much more on this week's edition of the Bundesliga Preview Show
