With the Supercup the first title of the season goes to the BVB. Also because FC Bayern suddenly fell back into its counter-prone pattern.
With petrified faces, the FC Bayern players trudged up the stairs from the interior into the mixed zone. Quickly into the cabin, quickly away from Dortmund, swiftly towards the Tegernsee training camp to work through what had gone wrong in Signal Iduna Park on this Saturday evening.
The tenor for those who had the leisure to give reasons for the 2-0 defeat in the preparation compulsory game called Supercup shortly before their departure was clear: too many individual mistakes, subsequently counter-prone, sloppy in dealing with one’s own possibilities. Some might have felt reminded of the November of last year, when the Munich protagonists analyzed a 2:3 at the same place quite similarly.
“If you make so many mistakes, you have to reckon with losing,” Joshua Kimmich said, adding: “Every child now knows that Dortmund is counter-strong.” The great quality of the black-yellow, which was already decisive during the last trip of Bavaria to the Ruhrpott. “There’s a pattern in how we get our goals in Dortmund,” Kimmich explained. That was “naïve”, connected with “lack of concentration” and in the end even “lack of quality”, as the legal defender mercilessly dissected.
The Munich team had made several mistakes in the construction game, sometimes even causing the Munich team to get into trouble. Especially Thiago, traditionally reliable in passing, usually one step further in his head than his opponent, caught a pitch-black evening.
The highly talented Spaniard was at least partly to blame for both goals. Midfielder Corentin Tolisso also produced an unusually large number of avoidable mistakes, especially in the first half. In addition, Jerome Boateng and Niklas Süle, Dortmund’s switch-over offensive had invited right at the start to score goals, but this went unpunished.
“They are lurking to win balls in the centre and then quickly play their way forward,” said Manuel Neuer with a view to the tactical march of the hosts. Not a particularly surprising approach by Lucien Favre’s team, one might think. Why did the Bayern defence nevertheless find itself confronted with such difficulties, why didn’t the counter-guarding take hold when “every child” knows about the counter strength of the Borussians, as Kimmich says?
The fact that coach Niko Kovac offered only a classic sixth instead of two defensive midfielders and thus generated potential freedom for the opponent in the event of ball loss was not a reason for Neuer to accept. “We didn’t have that many top midfielders. Leon Goretzka and Corentin Tolisso were no closer to Robert Lewandowski than to Thiago,” said the FCB captain, adding: “That didn’t play such a big role.
Kimmich explained Dortmund’s predominance in key scenes exclusively on the basis of the large number of individual slip-ups. “I’m of the opinion that counter-locking is an issue. But you can’t hedge every single ball loss.” It was “difficult to find the cause. There wasn’t just one player standing next to him, it was like that in the collective,” said Kimmich, who spoke of a “mistake festival”.
Lewandowski, on the other hand, even noted a lack of self-confidence. “After the backlog, we didn’t believe 100 percent in shooting the game. It was like last season, when we got a goal against each other. We’re trying to keep playing, but you have to believe in it.”
Despite the relatively low radiance of the competition, Kimmich was sure that everyone had called 100 percent. “We don’t go home and say: ‘Wasn’t so important, we didn’t want to win at all'”, the national player responded to the question about the relevance of the Supercup. By the way, what was important to all those responsible for Bavaria was that the BVB was at best the cleverer team, but not the necessarily better one.
“First of all, I congratulate Dortmund on its victory. But we weren’t any worse,” said a noticeably pissed off sports director Hasan Salihamidzic, who said: “We played a good game, but made a lot of mistakes. We’ve also missed a lot of opportunities.”
Kimmich was of the opinion that the Westphalians couldn’t be satisfied with their game either, because the duel was “the worst Dortmund-Bayern game in terms of level I’ve played in so far”. The runner-up was simply “less bad today”.
Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see what the learning effect will be from the bankruptcy in Dortmund. The last forgotten vulnerability to counterattacks will determine the next few days. Brazzo swore that he would take a lot of knowledge from the game with him. He did it with a petrified face. Just before he said goodbye without a greeting. Let’s get the hell out of Dortmund.
