Werder Bremen overturn a two-goal deficit to beat Augsburg 3-2 with a stoppage-time winner

Werder Bremen were 2-0 down with just over half an hour to go and finished the afternoon celebrating a stoppage-time winner. Daniel Thioune's side scored three times in the last 25 minutes to beat FC Augsburg 3-2 at the Weserstadion, completing one of the Bundesliga's biggest turnarounds of the young season.

Augsburg had made the fast start. Robin Fellhauer finished a swift break in the 18th minute after Fabian Rieder's vertical pass, and Calvin Brackelmann doubled the lead in the 58th minute with a firm header from an Alexis Claude-Maurice cross. For close to an hour, the visitors looked in complete control of a game they had led from the first half onward.

Twenty-five minutes that flipped the game

1. 66' — Marco Grüll cuts inside past Noahkai Banks after being released by Chuki and fires into the top corner to make it 2-1.
2. 86' — Niclas Füllkrug lashes a shot from the edge of the box past goalkeeper Finn Dahmen to level it at 2-2.
3. 90+3' — Grüll lays the ball across from the left, and substitute Mitchell Weiser finishes left-footed for the 3-2 winner.

Grüll's involvement in all three goals — scoring the first, assisting the second and setting up the third — made him the easy choice for Man of the Match, taking 51% of the fan vote. It was the kind of match-defining sequence that turns a routine home defeat into a result Bremen will still be talking about at the international break.

Run of form

Werder Bremen had opened the round 10th in the table on 4 points from a loss, a win and a draw. The comeback win takes them to 7 points from four games, level with Augsburg despite conceding the game's first two goals — form that has gone loss, win, draw, win across the month, with the last two results both coming from below-par starting positions. Augsburg, meanwhile, had opened the day 3rd on 7 points from two wins and a draw, unbeaten in three and sitting in the Champions League places; conceding a two-goal lead in the closing stages is the kind of result that will sting more than a straightforward defeat, and puts that early-season place under pressure once the rest of the round is in.

Team news

Thioune kept the same starting eleven for a third straight Bundesliga match, the kind of continuity a manager only keeps affording a team that has been competitive rather than one that just fell 2-0 behind at home. Augsburg made a single change from their previous outing: Mert Kömür came in for his first league start of the season, replacing Arijon Ibrahimović in the front line that had Bremen chasing the game for the best part of an hour.

A number that stood out

The underlying numbers make the turnaround look even more lopsided than the scoreline suggests. Bundesliga.com's own tracking had Werder Bremen out-chancing Augsburg 2.81 expected goals to 0.81 across the ninety minutes — more than three times the away side's total, even though it was Augsburg leading for most of the afternoon. Weiser's stoppage-time winner was itself a low-probability strike, rated at just a 9% chance of going in by that same measure, which is exactly the kind of finish that separates a team that dominates territory from one that actually walks away with the points. Grüll, at the centre of all three goals, was also the fastest player on the pitch, clocked at 33.79 km/h during the run past Noahkai Banks that produced Bremen's first goal — a burst of pace from the 28-year-old Austrian winger that set the tone for everything that followed.