Relentless 5-1 comeback win was ominous and made one wonder how many goals champions could score this season
V
incent Kompany had warned after their completion of a record-pace Hinrunde of the Bundesliga season that Bayern would have to “start completely from scratch” for the campaign’s second half. The message clearly got across. Poor RB Leipzig could not have known that his players would interpret that quite so literally.
On Wednesday Bayern had done the job in Köln; on Saturday in Leipzig, they gave the full manifestation of their brilliance as the evening went on. This became the numbers of the season’s first half made flesh. It is difficult to know what their hosts could have done much differently. Leipzig had been “clearly the better team” in the first 45, as Kompany had admitted. “It felt like they were twice as good as us.” His opposite number, Ole Werner, described his team’s first half as “the almost perfect performance”, and it was difficult to argue. Had Antonio Nusa, part of the excellent collective movement that led to Rômulo’s opener, taken one of the two good chances he missed in that time, then perhaps the discussion would be different.
Yet having gone into the break a goal down for the first time this season, Bayern were full of second-half hunger. The equaliser, Serge Gnabry’s 100th goal for the club, came after Christoph Baumgartner was pressed – actually, less pressed than swamped – by a trio of Bayern players some 35 yards from his own goal, with centre-back Dayot Upamecano the one to steal and send in Gnabry for his finish. With three goals in the last 10 minutes to garnish after Harry Kane had given them the lead, they were Darth Vader pushing his foot down on Obi-Wan Kenobi’s empty cape on the Death Star. Yes, they were really finished. Perhaps Leipzig should take that as a compliment.
