Player Focus: Ilkay Gündoğan

True, it wasn't Ilkay Gündoğan's best performance. But then neither was it Borussia Dortmund's as a whole. "There's one very disappointed team at the moment and one very lucky one," coach Jürgen Klopp said. "I didn't expect to see this from my side – it was our worst game in the Champions League so far."

Caught up in the euphoria of a two-goal swing in stoppage-time from 2-1 down in the 90th minute to 3-2 up against Malaga in the 93rd, Klopp had missed that four of his players, including goalscorer Felipe Santana, were offside in the build-up to their winning goal.

Yet, as he rightly pointed out, Malaga's second shouldn't have been allowed to stand either. That Dortmund are among the competition's last four for the first time since they were the holders in 1998 owed much to good fortune, but also what goalkeeper Roman Weidenfeller called "irrepressible determination."

More than Santana, their hero on the night was Marco Reus. Twice he got Dortmund back into the game, first with a twist of the body that allowed him to back-heel a pass into the path of Robert Lewandowski - the assist of the Champions League this season and his first in the competition - and then by sweeping home a loose ball to level it 2-2 in added time and make a turnaround, Dortmund's very own `99 moment, a realistic possibility.

By this time, Gündoğan had been taken off and replaced by Mats Hummels. He left the field with a 91% pass completion rate, the highest of any outfield player on the night apart from Malaga centre-back Martin Demichelis.

Taken in isolation, it's an impressive statistic. Gündoğan did play some nice passes. He picked the ball up deep in his own half and played it forward when he could direct into feet. One through ball in particular during the first half caught the eye, only for its recipient to be adjudged offside.

Overall, though, his range of action had been quite effectively limited. A combination of one of Malaga’s forward players dropping deep to cover and the midfield tandem of Ignacio Camacho and Jeremy Toulalan in front of him, who kept a good shape about them, as the visitors did as a whole, made for a difficult evening. Gündoğan wasn’t allowed to dictate the tempo as a consequence and the speed of the game was slowed. Dortmund couldn't sustain a rhythm.

Wednesday's Suddeutsche Zeitung had this to say about him: "Supposedly the new Bastian Schweinsteiger. Struggled to live up to his reputation against Malaga."

You don't judge a player on a single game, though. Over the last year, Gündoğan has emerged as a one of Dortmund's most important components, an unsung member of a now star-studded cast who hasn't got the same press as Lewandowski, Reus and Mario Götze, players he sets the stage for from his position deep in midfield.

Gündoğan joined Dortmund as a 20-year-old from 1. FC Nürnburg in the summer of 2011. He’d broken into a team threatened by relegation and in need of a play-off to survive the previous year and helped turned them around to the extent that they then finished sixth.

Signed for €4m, he was brought in to replace the Real Madrid-bound Nuri Şahin, who departed as the Bundesliga Player of the Season, recognition for the part he played in Dortmund’s first league title in nine years.

Stepping into that role was daunting. On Şahin’s return 18 months later, however, he’d find that Gündoğan has made it his own.

It was far from a smooth transition, though. Gündoğan required time to adjust. Going from a team where there were no expectations to the newly crowned champions at first felt like too much, too soon.

Asked if it were true that he was shocked on joining Dortmund at just how much big a step-up it was from Nürnburg, he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine: “Not shocked exactly. But I was really surprised by the level I found there. I knew I’d come to the German champions but I also knew that I'd had a really good season with Nürnburg. But I realised it was a huge change in training, as many of the players I was running around with were world class.”

Initially, Gündoğan was disappointing. He was left out by Klopp and made to sit in the stands to get a perspective on things. It “flipped a switch,” Gündoğan revealed. He trained with a different attitude and became “more active, demanding the ball more.”

The turning point came in February last year. Dortmund were playing Hannover at home when Sven Bender got injured after only eight minutes. Klopp signaled to Gündoğan to replace him. “I was unexpectedly thrown in at the deep end without time to think about it. Which was probably just as well. Anyway I had a good game and since then things have gone very well overall.”

Gündoğan went from flop to top player as Dortmund retained the Bundesliga for the first time since 1996. Kicker gave him a season’s average of 2.36 out of 6, not bad considering 1 is the highest a player can achieve.

After making his debut for Germany against Belgium in October 2011, Gündoğan was included in Joachim Löw’s 23-man squad for Euro 2012. Playing for Turkey had been a possibility too of course.

An approach was made by the Turkish Federation, but Gündoğan, whose grandfather moved to the Ruhr to work in the Nordstern mine in Gelsenkirchen before bringing his grandmother, uncle and father to live in the region, opted for Germany, the country he’d represented, unlike Şahin, at youth level.

Löw has described Gündoğan as “indispensable” to his plans, among which there is, in the long-term anyway, the need to find a successor to Schweinsteiger, who, lest we forget, is still only 28 but quite prone to injury. He was impressive as Germany beat France 2-1 in Paris for the first time in 26 years two months ago, setting up Thomas Müller to equalise shortly after half-time.

It was another reminder, after that he gave at the Etihad against Manchester City in the Champions League, of what a good season Gündoğan’s enjoying. Kicker went so far as to call him “Dortmund’s Xavi” after the first leg of their quarter-final against Malaga. That’s an overstatement. What’s true, though, a lot of Dortmund’s play does go through Gündoğan.

He has progressed a lot and his influence on the team has certainly grown. For instance the average number of passes he makes has jumped considerably from 47.9 per game last season to 58.9 this term.

As much was clear against former club Nürnburg at the end of January. Gündoğan completed 126 passes and touched the ball 147 times, a high in each case in the Bundesliga this season and enough to rank him among the top 10 achieved by a player in a single game across Europe’s five major leagues too.

“It sounds pretty good, right enough,” he told the Bundesliga’s official website. “147’s not a bad tally, but I needed to be on the ball as much as possible. It was so cold!”

As long as Gündoğan can keep bringing the heat, expect Dortmund to come to the boil in what remains of their season in the Champions League.