9 hours ago
1
Something seemed to break here, and it was not just Xabi Alonso’s proud unbeaten record over Bayern Munich. For Vincent Kompany are cruising to the Bundesliga title and now they are cruising to the Champions League quarter-finals too. They may well sign Leverkusen’s best player Florian Wirtz in the summer, but here they played him off the park. It feels like game over, and in more senses than one.
This week the Bayern director of sport Max Eberl made an eye-catching comparison. He compared Alonso and Vincent Kompany to Pep Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp, the coaching duopoly that shaped modern football for almost a decade. Bit soon for all that, most people reckoned, but it feels just a little less fanciful now. The bloke who got Burnley relegated to the Championship may just be the next big thing in European coaching.
They were good value for this too, thwarting and throttling Leverkusen well before Matej Kovar dropped a simple cross to let Jamal Musiala in for a simple second and the wretched Nordi Mukiele was dismissed for a second yellow card shortly after.
Harry Kane was back to near his best, heading in the first goal and smashing in the last. Leverkusen ended the game with just three shots, and even a second-half injury to Manuel Neuer failed to arrest the procession, the Allianz roaring their side home in a show of magnificent imperial disrespect. This is Germany’s great rivalry now, its superclasico, the fourth of five instalments this season of an epic duel that seems to bring out the maverick in both. How curious, for example, that Bayern chose this of all weeks to step up their interest in Wirtz. And yet if Bayern were trying to get into their opponents’ heads then it barely registered against the extent to which Xabi Alonso’s side have managed to get into theirs over the past couple of seasons.
Bayern are Alonso’s favourite canvas, his preferred muse, the Laura Dern to his David Lynch. Again he went into this game without a recognised striker: a pretty standard 4-4-2 out of possession, but with Nordi Mukiele pushed up high on the right when they got the ball high on the right. Jeremie Frimpong drifted in from the right wing, creating a rotating three-way threat with Wirtz and Amine Adli.
The trouble was that Adli has been restricted to just five starts this season by injury and looked unsuited to a game of this intensity. And somehow Leverkusen’s system of organised chaos – lots of long balls from the keeper, trying to jackal the scraps in midfield – seemed to blunt the threat of Wirtz as well, who was aggressively tailed by Joshua Kimmich everywhere he went and struggled for rhythm.
Meanwhile, with Kane dropping deep into his customary zone of interest, Bayern were also well staffed in the centre, and in a game of tight squeezes and quick switches they had plenty of speed on the counter to take advantage.
It was from one such broken situation that the opening goal arrived: Kane winning the ball in the centre, spraying it out to Michael Olise and trotting in blind side of Mukiele to meet the cross. The header from 11 yards was brilliant, utterly emphatic: think Stephen Hendry pocketing a tricky blue and smashing the cue ball into the bunch.
after newsletter promotion
There is of course a danger in explaining away everything through tactics. You can lose with a great tactical plan and win with a bad one. But as Bayern slowly turned the screw on Leverkusen here, you could see how far Kompany has already developed as a coach, even in the nine months he has been in Germany.
There was a clear Guardiola influence in the way the full-backs tapered inwards to snuff out the counter, in the way Kompany opted for the pure straight-line speed of Kingsley Coman over Leroy Sané or Serge Gnabry. And on the other wing, he has in Olise a player currently reaching at the limits of his talents and grasping only fresh air.
Kovar’s howler was the point at which Leverkusen pretty much began to self-destruct. Mukiele gave Michael Oliver no choice but to award him a second yellow for a petty pointless challenge by the touchline; Edmond Tapsoba came on and after shanking a clearance immediately grappled Kane to the ground to give away a penalty. On the touchline, Alonso stared at his pristine white trainers. When it’s not your night, it’s really not your night.
