Nagelsmann feeling the heat ahead of Lewandowski return over Bayern’s stuttering start
They say the clocks work differently in Bavaria. Evidently, so does maths.
For in Munich, 1-1 + 1-1 + 2-2 = crisis.
Three draws in a row have darkened the mood considerably ahead of Bayern great Robert Lewandowski’s return to face them with new club Barcelona in the Champions League group stage tomorrow night (Tuesday).
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To paraphrase 1980s blue-eyed soul popsters The Blow Monkeys, it didn’t have to be this way.
On another day, Julian Nagelsmann’s heavily-rotated side do just enough to win 2-1 against lowly visitors Stuttgart and Matthijs de Ligt’s late lunge on Serhou Guirassy goes unpunished on account of its very lateness. The Guinea international had already taken his shot and missed when Bayern’s Dutch centre-back clattered into him, but referee Christian Dingert took a rigid view. Guirassy converted the penalty two minutes into second-half stoppage time.
Truth be told, Bayern could hardly complain. They had been the beneficiaries early in the second half when Dingert blew for a foul and disallowed a Guirassy goal because Chris Fuhrich pulled Joshua Kimmich back in the champions’ box with the faintest of touches.
They had also played their worst game of the new season by some margin. Nagelsmann bemoaned poor gegenpressing as well as imprecise finishing, while looking a little shocked by the performance.
Thomas Muller, the sole big name who talked to the media after a result that means Bayern are off to their worst Bundesliga start since 2010-11, professed himself “really angry with ourselves”, for not staying focused and committed right through to the end.
Schlampig (the German word for sloppy) didn’t begin to describe it.
Next day, sporting director Hasan Salihamidzic tried to defend Nagelsmann but threw up more questions in the process.
“Julian is still finding his own style, he’s never had a squad like this,” the 45-year-old said in reference to the head coach’s wholesale rotation policy. (Leroy Sane, Sadio Mane, Lucas Hernandez, Marcel Sabitzer and Benjamin Pavard had all been left out of the starting XI.)
The implication was pretty clear: Nagelsmann is having a tough time keeping everyone happy. Interestingly, Salihamidzic also admitted he’d expected these problems and even said he was prepared to accept the odd poor result: “I told Julian I’d prefer to have a few more draws than a bad atmosphere and many discontented players.”
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In purely numerical terms, Salihamidzic is surely right to believe that Bayern can afford to drop the occasional point and still win an 11th straight domestic title, with the challengers below them being reliably inconsistent. But he’s underestimating the corrosive effect of disappointing results on team harmony.
It’s one thing keeping all the star players in line when Bayern are winning, quite another when they’re drawing and ceding the No 1 spot to the likes of Union Berlin and Freiburg. Not even the most tactful rotation can stave off the bad atmosphere and discontent that stem from underwhelming results. There are already dark whispers about certain players being critical of Nagelsmann’s tactics, to say nothing about his pointing the finger at them.
Every negative result will stoke the pesky debate about Bayern going without a No 9 this season, but the bigger issue might be the change of dressing-room dynamics post-Lewandowski.
While the Pole’s departure was largely welcomed and seen as liberating internally, it has also left behind a sort of structural vacuum. None of the forwards tasked with stepping up have made themselves indispensable so far, though all of them naturally consider themselves automatic starters.
Nagelsmann is torn between two imperatives: he has to constantly rearrange his pieces for political reasons but also maintain the sense of rhythm every good Bayern team needs to perform smoothly.
The Stuttgart game painfully exposed the difficulty of that balancing act. And with a rejuvenated Barcelona in town next, the stakes have become much higher for him than anyone would have anticipated this early in the season.
Will Union “do a Leicester” this sesaon? It’s not an altogether serious question (yet) but a 1-0 win at Cologne kept their fantastic run going. Cologne coach Steffen Baumgart praised the visitors as “the best team I’ve seen for a long time” for their typically dogged performance, which was greeted by “German champions, only Union Berlin” chants from the away fans at the final whistle.
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Fellow surprise tickets Freiburg, meanwhile, missed out on the No 1 spot after drawing 0-0 with Borussia Monchengladbach, and Hoffenheim continue to be in hot pursuit following their 4-1 win over 10-man Mainz. The top four (minus third-placed Bayern) has never looked weirder, even by the standards of the Bundesliga, an upside-down world where strange creatures regularly rise out of the shadows to scare the existing order.
For one of the big beasts of the league, this weekend probably proved an end of sorts, however.
Wolfsburg’s Max Kruse was publicly banished from the squad by coach Niko Kovac in the wake of their first win of the season, 1-0 away to Eintracht Frankfurt.
“We haven’t seen any indication that he can help the team,” Kovac said of the forward’s absence, adding that Kruse would never play for Wolfsburg, or indeed any Bundesliga club, again.
The 34-year-old dryly countered that he would decide on the end of his career in the German top flight himself and denied a lack of identification with the club the next day.
As video clips from Kruse go, it was a rather tame affair.
Elsewhere, Bochum’s Thomas Reis has been sacked after a sixth league defeat out of six to start the season — 3-1 at Schalke. Heiko Butscher comes in as caretaker while the club look for someone prepared to sign up for a mission that doesn’t look especially enticing.
But the most keenly-felt exit of the week happened online.
“Collina’s Erben“ (heirs of Collina), a Twitter account dedicated to explaining refereeing decisions and procedures, deleted themselves after a raft of negative comments and insults this weekend.
The Collinas had valiantly attempted to make sense of an admittedly rather odd moment (something about “a natural position of the arm”), namely referee Benjamin Brand waving play on after Jean-Paul Boetius’ shot for Hertha Berlin hit the outstretched arm of Bayer Leverkusen defender Odilon Kossounou on the line late in a game that ended 2-2.
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The over-the-top backlash proved the only thing which riles up a certain section of supporters more than a VAR intervention is a VAR non-intervention, which sort of leaves us back on square one, come to think of it.
At the heart of the problem are neither technology nor refereeing incompetence, but the inherent vagary of certain Laws of the Game, combined with an almost pathological inability to accept neither outcomes that go against their team nor different points of view held by some.
Honestly? It’s pathetic.
https://theathletic.com/3586432/2022/09/12/bundesliga-bayern-nagelsmann-lewandowski/
Nagelsmann feeling the heat ahead of Lewandowski return over Bayern’s stuttering start
They say the clocks work differently in Bavaria. Evidently, so does maths.
For in Munich, 1-1 + 1-1 + 2-2 = crisis.
Three draws in a row have darkened the mood considerably ahead of Bayern great Robert Lewandowski’s return to face them with new club Barcelona in the Champions League group stage tomorrow night (Tuesday).
ADVERTISEMENT
To paraphrase 1980s blue-eyed soul popsters The Blow Monkeys, it didn’t have to be this way.
On another day, Julian Nagelsmann’s heavily-rotated side do just enough to win 2-1 against lowly visitors Stuttgart and Matthijs de Ligt’s late lunge on Serhou Guirassy goes unpunished on account of its very lateness. The Guinea international had already taken his shot and missed when Bayern’s Dutch centre-back clattered into him, but referee Christian Dingert took a rigid view. Guirassy converted the penalty two minutes into second-half stoppage time.
Truth be told, Bayern could hardly complain. They had been the beneficiaries early in the second half when Dingert blew for a foul and disallowed a Guirassy goal because Chris Fuhrich pulled Joshua Kimmich back in the champions’ box with the faintest of touches.
They had also played their worst game of the new season by some margin. Nagelsmann bemoaned poor gegenpressing as well as imprecise finishing, while looking a little shocked by the performance.
Thomas Muller, the sole big name who talked to the media after a result that means Bayern are off to their worst Bundesliga start since 2010-11, professed himself “really angry with ourselves”, for not staying focused and committed right through to the end.
Schlampig (the German word for sloppy) didn’t begin to describe it.
Next day, sporting director Hasan Salihamidzic tried to defend Nagelsmann but threw up more questions in the process.
“Julian is still finding his own style, he’s never had a squad like this,” the 45-year-old said in reference to the head coach’s wholesale rotation policy. (Leroy Sane, Sadio Mane, Lucas Hernandez, Marcel Sabitzer and Benjamin Pavard had all been left out of the starting XI.)
The implication was pretty clear: Nagelsmann is having a tough time keeping everyone happy. Interestingly, Salihamidzic also admitted he’d expected these problems and even said he was prepared to accept the odd poor result: “I told Julian I’d prefer to have a few more draws than a bad atmosphere and many discontented players.”
ADVERTISEMENT
In purely numerical terms, Salihamidzic is surely right to believe that Bayern can afford to drop the occasional point and still win an 11th straight domestic title, with the challengers below them being reliably inconsistent. But he’s underestimating the corrosive effect of disappointing results on team harmony.
It’s one thing keeping all the star players in line when Bayern are winning, quite another when they’re drawing and ceding the No 1 spot to the likes of Union Berlin and Freiburg. Not even the most tactful rotation can stave off the bad atmosphere and discontent that stem from underwhelming results. There are already dark whispers about certain players being critical of Nagelsmann’s tactics, to say nothing about his pointing the finger at them.
Every negative result will stoke the pesky debate about Bayern going without a No 9 this season, but the bigger issue might be the change of dressing-room dynamics post-Lewandowski.
While the Pole’s departure was largely welcomed and seen as liberating internally, it has also left behind a sort of structural vacuum. None of the forwards tasked with stepping up have made themselves indispensable so far, though all of them naturally consider themselves automatic starters.
Nagelsmann is torn between two imperatives: he has to constantly rearrange his pieces for political reasons but also maintain the sense of rhythm every good Bayern team needs to perform smoothly.
The Stuttgart game painfully exposed the difficulty of that balancing act. And with a rejuvenated Barcelona in town next, the stakes have become much higher for him than anyone would have anticipated this early in the season.
Will Union “do a Leicester” this sesaon? It’s not an altogether serious question (yet) but a 1-0 win at Cologne kept their fantastic run going. Cologne coach Steffen Baumgart praised the visitors as “the best team I’ve seen for a long time” for their typically dogged performance, which was greeted by “German champions, only Union Berlin” chants from the away fans at the final whistle.
ADVERTISEMENT
Fellow surprise tickets Freiburg, meanwhile, missed out on the No 1 spot after drawing 0-0 with Borussia Monchengladbach, and Hoffenheim continue to be in hot pursuit following their 4-1 win over 10-man Mainz. The top four (minus third-placed Bayern) has never looked weirder, even by the standards of the Bundesliga, an upside-down world where strange creatures regularly rise out of the shadows to scare the existing order.
For one of the big beasts of the league, this weekend probably proved an end of sorts, however.
Wolfsburg’s Max Kruse was publicly banished from the squad by coach Niko Kovac in the wake of their first win of the season, 1-0 away to Eintracht Frankfurt.
“We haven’t seen any indication that he can help the team,” Kovac said of the forward’s absence, adding that Kruse would never play for Wolfsburg, or indeed any Bundesliga club, again.
The 34-year-old dryly countered that he would decide on the end of his career in the German top flight himself and denied a lack of identification with the club the next day.
As video clips from Kruse go, it was a rather tame affair.
Elsewhere, Bochum’s Thomas Reis has been sacked after a sixth league defeat out of six to start the season — 3-1 at Schalke. Heiko Butscher comes in as caretaker while the club look for someone prepared to sign up for a mission that doesn’t look especially enticing.
But the most keenly-felt exit of the week happened online.
“Collina’s Erben“ (heirs of Collina), a Twitter account dedicated to explaining refereeing decisions and procedures, deleted themselves after a raft of negative comments and insults this weekend.
The Collinas had valiantly attempted to make sense of an admittedly rather odd moment (something about “a natural position of the arm”), namely referee Benjamin Brand waving play on after Jean-Paul Boetius’ shot for Hertha Berlin hit the outstretched arm of Bayer Leverkusen defender Odilon Kossounou on the line late in a game that ended 2-2.
ADVERTISEMENT
The over-the-top backlash proved the only thing which riles up a certain section of supporters more than a VAR intervention is a VAR non-intervention, which sort of leaves us back on square one, come to think of it.
At the heart of the problem are neither technology nor refereeing incompetence, but the inherent vagary of certain Laws of the Game, combined with an almost pathological inability to accept neither outcomes that go against their team nor different points of view held by some.
Honestly? It’s pathetic.
https://theathletic.com/3586432/2022/09/12/bundesliga-bayern-nagelsmann-lewandowski/
