Borussia Mönchengladbach captain Tim Kleindienst delivered a scathing assessment of his teammates after Saturday’s 4-3 Bundesliga defeat to newly promoted SV Elversberg. Gladbach appeared on course for their first points of the new campaign after establishing a 3-1 lead through Hugo Bolin’s brace and Joe Scally’s second-half goal.
Eugen Polanski’s side nevertheless conceded three times over the final half-hour to suffer a second consecutive league defeat. Polanski described his side’s persistent failure to defend as “pure madness” after the match and promised “shock therapy” video review sessions. Kleindienst went considerably further when discussing the individual mistakes and lapses in concentration that contributed to the collapse.
Gladbach have now conceded seven goals across their opening two Bundesliga fixtures. The Foals followed up a 3-0 opening-day defeat away at RB Leipzig by surrendering a two-goal advantage against Elversberg at Borussia-Park.
“We urgently need to ramp up our focus so that it lasts for 90 minutes,” the Gladbach captain told ZDF. “I don’t know what the problem is — watch less TikTok or whatever. I honestly don’t care what they do. In the end, they just need to do something so that they remain locked in for 90 minutes, hang in there and maintain their focus so that we defend until the end and don’t make senseless turnovers, misplaced passes and fouls that place us in danger.”
Gladbach captain questions repeated mistakes
Speaking separately to DAZN, Kleindienst returned to Gladbach’s defensive problems.
“We score three goals at home,” he said. “That should be enough against a promoted team. But we’ve already been in a phase where we simply couldn’t score as many goals as we conceded. We’ve now conceded seven goals in two games, so we should really be asking ourselves what we’re actually doing back there.”
Kleindienst also addressed the mistakes made by Gladbach’s younger players. The captain stressed that errors from inexperienced players were understandable, but criticized the failure to adjust when the same problems continued to occur.
“It’s normal that they make mistakes,” Kleindienst said. “But after the second, third or fourth time, it needs to stop. At a certain point, one has to learn from those mistakes during the game and that didn’t happen. In the end, after conceding the 3-3, that was the biggest heap of that we produced. I have no words for what happened here today.”
