A small step, perhaps, towards coming back on 5 June and having a second go at winning the Champions League in the arena where he lost the 2019 final. On his first European outing since winning the Ballon d’Or, the England captain was unable to score but he and his Bayern Munich team defeated Atlético Madrid, fellow semi-finalists from last season. They did so in a way that suggests that their candidacy this season is serious.
It may not have been sparkling but they had been superior almost from the start, dominant in physique and football. This is a team with few weaknesses, intense and impressive throughout. All Atlético could do was resist and it never truly felt like they would be able to do that for ninety minutes; ultimately, they lasted 54.
That was when Lennart Karl scored the first. The superb Konrad Laimer then added the second on a night when they racked up nineteen shots. It had been heavy going for a while, and they had been made to wait, but in the end Bayern were just that bit too good.
Although it began with Julián Alvarez bending a shot just wide after 115 seconds, the best picture of the first half was probably the Argentinian’s second shot nineteen minutes later. If that first effort had come from the edge of the area, the chance presenting itself, the second came from the edge of the centre circle, deep inside Atlético’s half and was not so much about opportunity as the lack of them. True, Manuel Neuer was a long way off his line but Alvarez was seventy yards away and his shot never really took flight and was never likely too either, drifting wide.
It was hard to avoid the conclusion that he had gone for it out of a kind of impotence, a desire to do something, anything. Atlético were given so few chances to get near to Neuer’s goal and not very many to get near the ball. There was one moment when a Marc Pubill cross almost reached Alexander Sørloth who couldn’t duck low enough to reach it at the far post, and another when the Norwegian momentarily seemed to have escaped Dayot Upamecano.
That, though, was about it. He cut a large and pretty lonely figure. Bayern reached the break with almost 70% of the possession, so much of it in a ten or fifteen metre strip along the front of the Atlético area and occasionally inside it.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
