Pep Guardiola has lost so few Bundesliga games that Bayern supporters have found it easy to file those rare occasions under “I” for “irrelevance” or even coolly reinterpret them as beneficial: a slightly bitter-tasting but necessary antidote to serial-winning-induced lethargy, football’s equivalent of a timely pinch in the arm. Saturday’s 3-1 defeat to Borussia Mönchengladbach was a bit different, however. The first pre-winter-break defeat in the Guardiola era – his first meaningful league defeat of all, truth be told – couldn’t simply be explained away as a useful primer for next spring’s crunch-time meetings with the European elite. It resembled the Bavarians’ prior failings at that level far too eerily for such comfort.
Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Christof Kneer wasn’t the only observer to notice how Oscar Wendt’s opener in the 54th minute had led to Bayern taking leave of their positional senses and blindly launching themselves into uncoordinated attacks that backfired immediately, the same way they had against Real Madrid (4-0, 2014) and Barcelona (3-0, 2015), in the two horrific Champions League semi-final exits that still threaten to define the 44-year-old’s legacy in Germany. “We lost our control after the 1-0,” admitted Guardiola himself on Saturday. His manner was relaxed but the criticism of his men couldn’t have been louder if he’d suddenly started screaming “Was erlaube Alonsoooo?” in the manner of Giovanni Trappatoni’s famous rant from 1998. Guardiola is not an idiot. On the Borussia Park pitch he saw that Bayern had reoffended, perpetrating the same crime against football that he regards as unforgivable. They had ceded composure and the ball, their own identity. As a consequence, they went from awe-inspiring and invincible to almost nothing in no time at all. Gladbach, emboldened by the visitors’ sudden fragility, finished them off with two more counterattacking moves in the space of 14 minutes. Substitute Franck Ribéry’s strike (81’) was a mere footnote.
“We have to learn from this game that we should never lose our control, the basis [of our game],” added the Catalan coach later. That’s a lesson that should surely be heeded but it’s not that easy to understand why and how Bayern were rendered unrecognisable by Wendt’s superbly crafted strike. Philipp Lahm ventured that his team were “no longer used to going behind”, which sounds a tad patronising but also rings unmistakably true. They had been behind three times in the league before this season, and came back each time to win. But against Gladbach, and on the second occasion this season that they conceded the game’s first goal after the break, they couldn’t recover. A similar, if less pronounced breakdown had happened after Manuel Neuer’s howler away to Arsenal in October.
A different line of inquiry could perhaps focus on the fact that Bayern hadn’t really properly controlled the game against the Foals to begin with. A spell of 15 good minutes in the opening half brought a flurry of chances that were either wasted or smothered by Yann Sommer (“We had the luck you need in these games but we also had a very good keeper,” said Gladbach’s coach André Schubert) but the league leader’s game had lacked the usual fluidity and cutting edge for most parts. Thomas Müller and Robert Lewandowski both had poor games, Kingsley Coman’s frightening pace (“He ran at Nico Elvedi at 800 kph,” Schubert said) failed to make a telling difference, Douglas Costa and Arjen Robben were missed as counterweights on the opposite flank and Javier Martínez struggled in a reprise of his “false 10” role as an early barrier to the home team’s combination game. Arturo Vidal, too, had limited impact.
As ever, individual shortcomings were amplified by tactical problems and vice versa. It would be grossly unfair to call this simply a Bayern defeat, for Gladbach were worthy winners. Schubert’s men had lined up in 3-5-2 system for the first time in nearly five years in the league, despite having had very little time to practice the formation in training. “It was more a theoretical exercise than a practical one,” said Wendt. Schubert gave some refreshingly honest insight into his decision process, explaining that some players had at first expressed doubts about changing the system but that they had, in the end, bought into the idea, too. At the break, he asked them again if they were still comfortable to play that way. The players nodded in agreement before changing to a 5-4-1 late on, of their own volition. Some coaches might have kept all that quiet after such a triumphant result, but Schubert, still unbeaten since taking over on the Foals’ bench in September, made sure to praise his team for showing that “they can deal incredibly well with responsibility and sort out things by themselves”. His predecessor Lucien Favre would have probably been a nervous wreck in the face of so much autonomy. But it is his ultra-detailed coaching that has laid the foundations for enabling so much flexibility.
Unlike many sides who start out with three at the back only to add more and more defenders as the pressure mounts, Schubert and his team vowed to keep five men in midfield, in order to bypass Bayern’s high pressing effectively. They became the first team in the league since Dortmund who weren’t prepared to park the bus and “the first one to play three at the back and one v one all over the pitch, to force them to play long balls”, as Granit Xhaka put it proudly. Whereas fourth-placed Hertha had raised the white flag from the outset last week and happily played without any ball(s), entrenching themselves deep in their own half even as Bayern were winning 2-0, Gladbach’s courage and application were duly rewarded. The Bavarians’ loss can have rarely meant more for the rest of the league – it proved that their superiority needn’t be suffered in acquiescence, that it should be challenged more often. “The team has shown today that they’re from planet Earth,” said the sporting director Matthias Sammer, “almost sounding happy that he had could at last marshal some demonstrable evidence for that theory”, as Frankfurter Rundschau noted.
For the Bundesliga on the whole, the grounding of Pep’s extraterrestrial is undoubtedly great news. “In football, a lot happens in the head,” noted Schubert, and perhaps one or two opposition heads will not now drop before a first ball is kicked. For Bayern, too, coming up against more resistance and finding themselves occasionally behind could increase their chances of fulfilling their treble dreams. But it will take another few months before their supporters will know whether the Gladbach defeat was ultimately helpful or merely the precursor to a third spring-time disaster.
Talking points
• The Hesse derby between Eintracht Frankfurt and Darmstadt ticked all the Bundesliga boxes. Fan choreography: yes. Ultras burning other ultras’ banners: of course. Ultras from the losing side trying to get on the pitch to give their players a (verbal) grilling: for sure. Throw in a deserved win for the plucky, tactically better underdogs (1-0 for the “Lilies”, Aytac Sulu), Armin Veh being honest and charming in the face of another crisis of confidence he’s unable to solve (“it won’t be easy to get through this situation”), and you’ve nearly got a full house. All that was missing was Eintracht boss Heribert Bruchhagen bemoaning the death of the league. But Sunday was probably not a good day to peddle that line.
• The honourable profession of greenkeeper has enjoyed a high profile in Germany ever since the former Bayern president Uli Hoeness vowed that former Bayern midfielder Lothar Matthäus would never be a lawnmower man at the Allianz Arena. Lesser known, however, is the greenkeeper’s bête noire, the “anti-greenkeeper”. That’s how Sky Germany described Augsburg goalie Marwin Hitz. The Swiss international went out of his way (and the goalmouth) to drag his studs across the lawn right next to the penalty spot in Cologne, cutting a deep furrow that penalty-taker Anthony Modeste promptly slipped on to miss the spot-kick. It shouldn’t have been given, in any case. Augsburg went on to win 1-0. Hitz later apologised for his unfair spot-fixing (“it won’t happen again”) and won’t face any recriminations from the German FA – it can only investigate incidents of gross unsporting behaviour, not behaviour that’s been merely unsporting. A police complaint from a lawn-loving member of the public (“Herr Hitz has deliberately damaged public property”) has no chance of succeeding either.
• If Hitz is smart, he’ll atone for the error of his ways with some charitable gardening work in an Augsburg park, since community service is all the rage as punishments go at the moment. The second-division Fortuna Düsseldorf pro Kerem Demirbay was told to officiate a girls’ Under-14s game by his club, as retribution for going all Keysie and Graysie on female referee Bibiana Steinhaus the previous weekend. Demirbay had told Steinhaus that “girls had no place in football” after getting dismissed for a second bookable offence. His outing as a referee didn’t go down that well either, however. The 22-year-old turned up in a grey wool designer coat and leather boots of the non-football variety to put the sincerity of the exercise somewhat in question. He’s facing a five-match ban that should be extended for one more week – for wearing a snood.
Results: Schalke 3-1 Hannover, Ingolstadt 1-1 Hoffenheim, Köln 0-1 Augsburg, Hamburg 1-3 Mainz, Borussia Mönchengladbach 3-1 Bayern Munich, Hertha Berlin 2-1 Bayer Leverkusen, Wolfsburg 1-2 Borussia Dortmund, Stuttgart 1-1 Werder Bremen, Eintracht Frankfurt 0-1 Darmstadt.
