![]() Muller’s remarkable intervention described the problem well, yet it stopped short of an explanation. ![]() “We’re overcomplicating things,” he said. In addition, he criticised his side for playing too many safe passes that didn’t progress the ball. But that pressure needs to turn into energy.” But I’m talking about taking decisions on the ball, about playing with intelligence, about making runs and understanding situations. “We had enough players of international quality. “We don’t have to have a go at the manager, it’s not about tactics,” the 34-year-old said. Thomas Muller concurred, going on a loud, angry rant about players “lacking the balls” to play with the sort of freedom and guile they routinely showed in training. “A team like ours should be able to adapt to a new system,” second-half substitute Joshua Kimmich claimed, quite rightly. And going out to negate their opponents’ strengths rather than ruthlessly exploit their weaknesses is not how things are traditionally done in Munich. Tuchel could not have known that Xabi Alonso would opt for a different system, too, moving away from his wing-back-reliant game to a hybrid four/five-at-the-back with the much more defensively-minded Bayern-loanee Josip Stanisic in Frimpong’s place.īoey had not played on the “wrong side” in four years. The unfamiliar setup, deployed for the first time this season, was designed to mirror Leverkusen and was supposed to pit the right-footed Sacha Boey on the left to deal with the pacy Jeremie Frimpong. The post-mortem predictably zoomed in on Tuchel’s surprise 3-4-3 formation, practised all week behind the grey curtains at the Sabener Strasse training ground. In the league, you had to go back even further, to 2009’s 5-1 humiliation away to eventual champions Wolfsburg, to find a title bout this one-sided in their opponents’ favour. For 11 years running, they have always turned up when it matters against whoever was closest at the time, but their defeat at BayArena was reminiscent of the 5-2 hammering by Jurgen Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund in the 2012 DFB-Pokal final, the year before their hegemony started. Seeing the serial champions being outplayed on an occasion of such magnitude was barely believable.
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