Winter break poses many questions

Those January blues can be swept aside when Bayern Munich travel to Wolfsburg on Friday in what has been dubbed a 'top-of-the-table' encounter. That may be correct on the face of it, yet the distance between the two teams is still insurmountable for the Wolves this season.

For the rest of the league, this doesn't appear to be any normal second part of the campaign: most sides lack consistency - the whole bottom-half is separated by three points - or struggle in one particular department, while others have suffered from persistent fitness concerns.

What the six-week January winter break has done is create a sense of unpredictability for the Rückrunde (second half of the season) - nobody really knows what to expect from a large chunk of the top-flight's 18 clubs.

Let's take Hamburg, for example. Okay, we know Hamburg are threatened with the drop, again, but the number of youngsters involved in their training camp in Abu Dhabi and those returning players certainly changes the dynamics of the team. Winger Maximilian Beister has recovered from long-term injury to bring speed and directness to the attack, whilst Zoltan Stieber was picked out as one of their best performers in the Middle East.

Various forms of recovery

Relegation rivals Stuttgart included six youth players in their winter training camp and after 18-year-old central defender Timo Baumgartl made a seamless transition to first-team football, the door is wide open for others to follow.

Names to watch out for at Stuttgart are, potentially, Ken Gipson (right-back), Stephen Sama (centre-back), Mart Ristl (central-midfielder), Marvin Wanitzek (attacker) and Odisseas Vlachodimos (goalkeeper).

Six teams have spent the last three weeks in the Turkish town of Belek. That's a few weeks of smart conditioning and regeneration. It's practically a whole pre-season, in some cases, for coaches to work closely with under-performing players and to work on various strategies on the training pitch.

That will probably be most visible in the second half of Borussia Dortmund's season. Title-challengers before the start of the season, they are now languishing second last in the Bundesliga. Players have returned from absence - Marco Reus and Mats Hummels, etc - to restore Dortmund to full strength on paper.

Kevin Kampl - a 12 million euro signing from RB Salzburg - should prove to be an astute addition this month, requiring little time to adjust to Jürgen Klopp's ideas of pressing having played under Roger Schmidt.

Even if they lose on the first weekend, expect a highly-improved Dortmund team after six weeks of preparation. Champions League, you say? You wouldn't rule it out.

The beauty of this winter break is that now it's just like it was in the summer: we can't really be sure what to expect from many Bundesliga sides in the months ahead.