| 28.09.2009 |
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| After suffering through another Hertha debacle, I spent yesterday at an election party watching the results of the least interesting political campaign in German history come in. The conversation, as it inevitably does when I'm in a room, quickly turned to football. My interlocutor was a fan of both Bayern and the Social Democrats -- and thus a double loser on the weekend. Yet even he admitted that Hamburg's 1-nil victory over Munich was a great game for neutral fans. Indeed, it was a fascinating match. Faced with the choice between Mario Gomez, Miro Klose and (at least theoretically) Luca Toni, Bayern coach Louis van Gaal left them all out of his starting eleven. (Toni played with the amateurs!) Instead van Gaal went for speed with Olic, Mueller, Ribery, Robben and -- surprisingly -- Philipp Lahm in midfield and Breno at the back. It was the sort of daring, innovative, scarcely anticipated strategy for which the Dutchman is famous. The only thing was: It didn't work. The idea was clearly that Bayern would steamroll Hamburg into submission early on, and for the first thirty minutes, they certainly did have Hamburg on their back heels. Hamburg's defenders only just managed to thwart Ribery and Robben, mostly by triple- and quadruple-teaming them. But then Hamburg found Bayern's weak spots, chiefly on the left side, where Jerome Boateng was often able to dribble the length the field, and in the middle, where Bayern's lack of midfield size left them vulnerable to long balls. And making the difference in the end was the guile and skill of former Bayern midfielder Ze Roberto, who set up the lone goal of the match with an absolutely killer pass. In the end, and ironically, it was Bayern's variety of options that was their undoing, whereas Hamburg's strength was the fact that who should play where is pretty obvious. But the outcome could have gone either way -- which is a lot more than you can say for the Merkel-Steinmeier snoozer. |
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