You can do this, I said to myself as I opened the door.
There they were, the entire Leverkusen selection all staring at me, their new manager.
A totally unknown person to them and the world and yet I was now going to be the man in charge.

I could tell from the looks on their faces that they weren't exactly sure how to behave, some perhaps felt that I didn't deserve to be in this position, others simply weren't sure what to expect.
The press has gone nuts since my announcement, headlines like: "Have Leverkusen lost their minds?" Have been dominating every sports paper in and outside of Germany.

Just keep calm, I walked into the middle of the room, totally surrounded I looked around, I stared each of them right in the eyes and then I spoke:

"My name is L. and I am going to be your new manager. Together we will embark upon a great journey, where this journey may take us I do not know, what I do know however is that I have faith in each and everyone of you. In return I only ask one thing, that you have faith in me aswell. I know that some of you probably don't agree with or don't understand my appointment but I ask each of you to give me a fair chance, get to know me first and then you may judge me."

Our pre-season has gone pretty much as I had expected.
We pretty much dominated every single match except the Genoa one, that one was a bit of a struggle but luckily we still ended up with a victory which shows the tremendous spirit of this squad.

The match against Münster might seem like a bad result however it is important to note that most of the squad consisted of u19 players as I was interested to see how they would perform.
Leverkusens youth facilities are pretty good so I will be looking to utilise them to their fullest potential.

With our pre-season now coming to a close the start of the season is coming closer every day.

We have also received our opponent for the UEFA Champions League Best Placed Playoff, Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk. Not a bad draw to be fair and I certainly expect us to make it into the Champions League.

A close look at the calendar reveiled our schedule for the upcoming month:


I start of my career as manager of Leverkusen with an away match at Alemannia Waldalgesheim for the DFB-Pokal, I will most likely be fielding a weaker team for that match as I don't expect Waldalgesheim to put up a fight.

Instead I will focus my attention on the home game against Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk, a good result in that match will put us in the Champions League with one leg so that match is going to be vital.

Then we face Werder Bremen at the BayArena for my first ever Bundesliga game, we then go to Ukraine for our 2nd leg against Dnipro and finally we will end the month with a tough away game against Schalke 04 at the VELTINS-Arena.

My first Bundesliga match saw us play at the Bayarena against Werder Bremen, I fully expected my team to win this one and they didn't disappoint.
A goal from Kießling put us ahead in the 24th minute and we didn't look in danger of losing that lead for a single second.

We didn't score any goals either anymore until the 88th minute when Junuzovic put the goal into his own net giving us a 2 goal lead, at this point the match was pretty much over but a header from Papadopoulos in the 90th minute gave us another goal making the final score 3-0.

1

Play this for more atmosphere!

Beep beep beep, the sound of my alarm bell woke me up, today is the day.
Today we will face Real Madrid in our first Champions League group match of the season.



My first ever Champions League match and I couldn't have asked for a better opponent.
Real Madrid, the most succesfull club in the Champions League's history, the current champions will face us at the BayArena.

If you are to believe the press then we stand little chance of getting a good result, the players however are extremely motivated.
They know that they have nothing to lose but everything to gain, personally I like being the underdogs as it allows us to play our game without any extra pressure.


The line ups are in:


Real Madrid's line up has offered a couple of surprises, firstly Navas will start in goal instead of Casillas and secondly Hernandez will start instead of Benzema.

Normally a team would miss players of the calibre of Casillas or Benzema but Real aren't an ordinary team and they can easily fill up these holes with other high quality players.



We are minutes away from kick-off the world famous anthem has started playing, I have done everything that I can.
I have prepared my players the best that I could and now it was up to them to do this club proud and boy they did!

Bayer 04 Leverkusen : Real Madrid

September

FC Augsburg : Bayer 04 Leverkusen

The Augsburg match turned out to be much harder then expected. The first half went really well and we were up 2-0 at half-time.

During the second half however Augsburg simply dominated the match, in all honesty I probably didn't make the right tactical choices in respons to their domination and so we lost our comfortable lead giving us a point instead of three.

Bayer 04 Leverkusen : Real Madrid

This result still amazes me to be honest!

The funny thing about this match is that Real didn't even play that bad. They had a lot more possession then us (62% vs 38%) but they simply didn't do anything with it.

We had far more shots then they did and that shows in the result. Real did score two goals themselves but fortunately both of those were offside.

Bayer 04 Leverkusen : Eintracht Frankfurt

Despite how it may look we absolutely dominated the entire match but the ball simply wouldn't go in the back of the net.

At the end of the match I decided to go on full overload and to bring on a substitution: Kruse. And he did exactly what I wanted him to do, in the last seconds of the match (literally the last action of the match) he scored a goal and we still managed to grasp our deserved three points.

Borussia Mönchengladbach : Bayer 04 Leverkusen

This match was expected to be tough and it really was. Gladbach played really well and had the most of posession but just like in the Real match we managed to create more chances.

Still Gladbach took the lead in the 50th minute which led me to go all out on attack, for a while it looked like we wouldn't get through but then in the 69th minute Toprak scored a beautiful header, this was exactly the boost that we needed as we managed to take the lead only 8 minutes later after Bellarabi capitalized on a mistake from Kramer (who ironically actually belongs to us but is on loan at Gladbach(we paid him :P)).

Then it was simply a matter of seeing the match through and we did exactly that.

Bayer 04 Leverkusen : Hamburger SV

HSV have been performing reasonably well in the league so I was expecting a narrow match with us grasping the win based on quality, I was wrong.

The match started off well enough after Yurchenko scored a long distance shot which was possible due to the fact that Adler made a huge mistake.
Then in the 13th minute Robin Tim Becker, a youth player who was only playing because our regular left full backs are both injured, gave away a foul in the penalty area and van der Vaart scored the resulting penalty with ease.

For the rest of the match we did everything we could to get another goal but HSV played really solid defensively and managed to avoid conceiding any more goals giving them and us a point each.

CSKA Moscow : Bayer 04 Leverkusen

Then came our second Champions League game against CSKA Moscow.
A win in this match would put us in an excellent position so I was really intend on getting a good result.

The match didn't begin well however as CSKA managed to take the lead after Natkho scored a perfect free-kick from 21 metres outside of the box. However this goal caused my team to wake up and in the 37th minute Stefan Kießling equalised with a powerful header from an assist of Brandt.

Then in the 41st minute Brandt himself scored the 2-1 giving us the lead before half time.
In the second half we continued to dominate and in the 81st minute Stefan Kießling scored another goal puting us up by two.

At this point I was fairly confident that the match was in the bag so I made a couple of substitutions and planned to simply see the match out, my team however had other plans.
They had no mercy for CSKA and substitute Drmic scored the 4-1 in the 84th minute, a mere 2 minutes later Bellarabi also put his name on the score sheet giving us a very comfortable 5-1 win.



All in all I'd say that September was another very impressive month for us, the draws against Augsburg and HSV aren't ideal as we simply should beat such teams but our two comfortable wins in the Champions League make more then up for that.

We did however have bad luck with injuries as Wendell is set to be out of the game for around 3 months and Boenisch is set to be out for 3 weeks thus leaving me with no real left full backs and as seen in the HSV match Becker simply isn't ready for the Bundesliga level yet.

David Yelldell our 2nd/3rd goalkeeper is also out for 3 months with a hip injury while promising midfielder Levin Öztunali is also out for around 2 weeks after getting injured on international duty.

Lets take a look at the Bundesliga table after six games played:


As you can see we are still very much in the top of the league sharing the second place with Wolfsburg and only 1 point behind current champions Bayern Munich.

In the Champions League things are looking even better:

We absolutely defied the odds with our huge victories over both Real and CSKA giving us the 1st place in our current group and putting us in a very strong position to make it into the next round.


Now that we have arrived at the end of September lets take a look at our upcoming month of October:



We start of the month against a struggling Hertha BSC side then we face another struggling side; Hannover 96.

We then have our next Champions League match against Dinamo Zagreb before facing fierce rival 1.FC Köln in the Rhein Derby.
We end of the month with our DFB-Pokal game against second league side Greuther Fürth.