Serhou Guirassy back among goals as Borussia Dortmund chase down Bayern Munich
Serhou Guirassy is back on the goal trail after netting three times in his last two games – can the prolific Borussia Dortmund striker now fuel a Bundesliga title challenge?
“You can clearly see that he’s thinking about it,” said Dortmund’s sporting director Sebastian Kehl after watching Guirassy pass up a great early chance in the UEFA Champions League defeat to Inter Milan in the club's final league phase game.
Having played in Bundesliga title-winning sides with prolific forwards such as Robert Lewandowski and Lucas Barrios, the BVB midfielder-turned-backroom-big-cheese knows that the jaw-dropping statistics of most goalscorers are inspired by instinct, not a careful thought process.
Perhaps the lack of spontaneity explains Guirassy’s recurring penalty spot problems. He had missed his last two spot-kicks before finally finding the net from 12 yards against Heidenheim on Matchday 20, despite goalkeeper Dinat Ramaj getting a hand to his effort. But later in the game, the gremlins returned to grind the goalscoring machine’s gears.
Watch: The best of Serhou Guirassy in 2025/26
“He wanted to try something again, which I didn’t like,” said disapproving coach Niko Kovač after seeing Guirassy’s attempt to grab a hat-trick fall embarrassingly flat. Before that, however, the Guinea international had added a second strike – just 84 seconds after his first – to turn a shock 1-2 scoreline against the league’s bottom side into a 3-2 lead.
“He scored twice today, struck the crossbar too, and was involved in a lot of good situations,” said Kehl in dissecting Guirassy’s performance. “All of that is going to help him.”
Kehl may have had a point. Guirassy had already sent a first-half header narrowly wide at the near post against Wolfsburg on Matchday 21, but he made no mistake with his second big opportunity of the contest three minutes from time.
After neat interplay between Felix Nmecha and Fábio Silva, Guirassy stroked home the latter’s pass to earn Dortmund a 2-1 victory and cut the gap to leaders Bayern to just three points ahead of the Bavarians’ clash with Hoffenheim on Sunday.
The nay-sayers will highlight that scoring against relegation-threatened teams is not necessarily sign of a sharpening of Guirassy’s acute ability to find the back of the net. But confidence – allied with instinct – is the ally of a prodigious goalscorer. And Guirassy has certainly proven he can be that.
Over the last three years, the 29-year-old’s exploits have only been overshadowed by the outrageous numbers Bayern’s Harry Kane has been putting up.
Following a brief and underwhelming spell at Cologne earlier in his career, Guirassy returned to Germany to join Stuttgart early in the 2022/23 season and hit the ground scoring.
With a previous career-best return of 10 goals from 27 Ligue 1 goals with Rennes in 2020/21, his 11 strikes in his first 22 Bundesliga games for VfB suggested he could prove a useful addition. He proved so much more than that as he morphed into one of Europe’s top strikers: 28 goals flowed in as many Bundesliga games the following season with 21 coming in 30 last term, his first in Dortmund.
He now has nine in 20 league matches this season – a healthy enough return if only not backlit by the stratospheric bar he has raised over the last three-and-a-half years in Germany. But also like all great goalscorers, Guirassy possesses unshakeable iron-clad self-confidence that no dip in form will breach.
“Last year, I scored a lot of goals, this year it’s fewer,” he told German TV. “That’s football. You have to keep your feet on the ground. It’s doesn’t affect me much.”
So don’t expect Guirassy to have his head turned by talk of Dortmund becoming genuine title challengers. But if he can now keep scoring, they would surely have a good chance of narrowing the gap to Bayern still further, especially as Vincent Kompany’s men come to Dortmund on Matchday 24.
If Guirassy does find the net regularly from now on, it will likely be that his instinct is in the ascendancy, because his chances of taking another spot-kick any time soon appear remote at best.
“That’s it for me on penalties for the time being,” said Guirassy after the victory over Heidenheim. “But we won again, and that is the most important thing.”
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