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Borussia Dortmund won seven of their first 10 games this season, happy times when they stuck four past Phonix Lubeck (yeah, I know), Heidenheim and Bochum and seven past Celtic, when their season was ripe with hope and optimism (even if all three of the non-wins were in the Bundesliga and they were therefore only sixth in the league when the run ended with three successive defeats ). Now they are eighth, three points behind Monchengladbach in sixth and also three points above 12th-placed Wolfsburg, the side that dumped them out of the German Cup back in October.
They have, in short, turned out to be not very good. Yet here they are, in the last eight of the Champions League, travelling to Barcelona and declaring, as their coach Niko Kovac did yesterday, that “we came here to win”. He has, it transpires, a cunning plan: “They have a lot of strengths but every opponent has weaknesses and we want to use them,” Kovac said. “It would not be wise to say what we have planned but we have an idea.”