Semi final Champions League-Half time: These Germans!!
Words to describe what we saw in the last 72 hrs:
Germacalypse, Ballanstorm, Blitzkrieg,
"seismic shift", "new dawn" and "changing football landscape"
Guys, the Germans are in town!!
Tuesday was a meticulous dismantling!
Wednesday was a beat down. A ruthless beat down!!
All over the world football hipsters are now switching their TVs over to The Bundesliga- as German football has now become mainstream.
When the CL Semi draw was made, the headlines were: "Barca and Real kept apart". Some even cried foul at the fact that the Germans were playing at home first!. How very patronising!!
In retrospect the true headline ought to have been "Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund kept apart". Some of us saw the handwriting on the wall, but the letters were just not this BOLD!!
BORUSSIA DORTMUND
Robert Lewandowski. Woof!
Jurgen Klopp. You beauty!
What made them tick again yesterday?
Relentless work ethic, Klopp, the fans, the athmosphere in the Westfalenstadion ( arguably World football's most kick-ass stadium) where 80 000 gather frequently irrespective of the opposition
-they play as if they have another man on the field. They are successful because they want to be. Desire can go a long way. It’s the effort that counts most.
Klopp - "At Dortmund you just can't be pleased with staying back and hoofing the ball upfield, the Fans don't like that.
Here people demand that the team should play with the attributes that are closest to my heart: with a lot of feeling and with intensity until the very last minute. We want to play the kind of football people remember."
He is enthusiastic, clever and funny.
In fact, he is very much like Mourinho during his early Chelsea years.
Against Real Madrid, you didn’t see so many tricks and flicks, but little bursts of speed, short sprints, and lots of quick passing and pressing high up the pitch ( Gegenpressing)
Anthony Lopopolo, a blogger, wrote:
"The team in yellow played without time to spare, as if they were late for an appointment
The German club came and went so quickly, and executed the Spanish giant so cleanly. This wasn’t a massacre or a hack job. You couldn’t find any blood on the ground. But there was a carcass, a few shrieks, and a lot of confusion.
Mourinho couldn’t explain why immediately after the match. He just knew his team lost, and that they deserved to lose
Such is the hallmark of Dortmund and modern German football: pace, and lots of it. They play to devastate. One blow follows another before you can even worry about the initial wound, and when Madrid fell to a 4-1 deficit, there was nothing they could really do. And they gave up"
BAYERN MUNCHEN
They gave us a thrashing," said Gerard Pique
"They were better and faster than us"
They 'munched' Barca
Van Gaal gave Bayern, the club that has always prided itself on the individual ability of their players, a strong footballing identity.
Heynckes built on these foundations, making the team more defensively balanced. Van Gaal's dogmatic "positional football" - everyone had to stick to their specific space on the pitch when attacking the opposition goal - was replaced by a much more fluid style that has given the front men licence to roam and swap almost at will.
In his second season, Heynckes has also added an element of the high pressing that has made Dortmund (and Barcelona before them) so effective. The team's excellent work ethic, a careful rotation policy and unparalleled strength in depth have made them the complete package.
Putting Tuesday's 4-0 routing of Barca into words:
It was just one rapier thrust after another. Furious one-touch passing and aggression in attack, always looking for the quick turn-around when intercepting the ball on the break and never wasting time with lateral passing to team mates
Unlike Barcelona, they don’t like to wait and ponder and debate their next move.
They've been compared them to the German stock market-"Whenever you feel this is it, they just keep going up, up, up. I have no idea where this one could end." (Gushed a fan)
This is the best football in the club's history," -club president , Uli Hoeness
Heynckes: "FC Bayern have never played a football this modern, this attractive, this contemporary in their whole history"
Of course, there is still 180 mins of football ( or more) to be played in this semi final clashes but you'd have balls of steel to bet against an all German final at Wembley
The future of Germany is in good hands with players like:
Hummels, Schmelzer, Boateng, Bender, Özil, Schürrle, Müller, Gündoğan, Herman, Götze, Reus... and that's just the players under the age of twenty five. The fact that all but one of them plays in the Bundesliga speaks volumes.
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