The drummers in the Südkurve beat out a tribal rhythm. Out on the pitch the players of Bayern Munich were unleashing wave after wave of feral attack, the crowd at the Allianz Arena swaying and baying along with them. And if you closed your eyes and tried not to think too hard, it was possible to imagine that these were other times, better times. That everything was going to be all right in the end.
They’re not, of course. Bayer Leverkusen are running away with the Bundesliga, coach Thomas Tuchel is off in the summer, and there’s a sound case for swilling out around a third of his underperforming squad with him. But still, the stolen glance at a truncated dream that dares to return their gaze. Bayern are still in the Champions League. They still have unfinished business and a front four you would wade through thick snow to watch. And they still have Harry Kane.
What an irony it would be if it was Kane – a man who has never won a trophy in his life – who dragged this bunch of serial medallists and hereditary champions over the line. It was his 32nd and 33rd goals of the season that put them into the quarter‑finals here, allied to another consummate European performance by Thomas Müller, and the more Bayern asserted themselves the more Lazio began to look like the ninth‑best team in Serie A.
And if Bayern do manage to negotiate the next three rounds and clamber their way up the step of Wembley’s royal box, they may reflect on the two minutes that turned this tie upside down. No sooner had Ciro Immobile missed a glorious free header from six yards that would have put Lazio 2-0 up on aggregate, than Kane was heading Bayern in front on the night from Raphaël Guerreiro’s scuffed shot. These are the margins, these are the moments. And Bayern know better than anyone that when it gets to this stage of the season, you take your little strokes of luck where you can get them.
Müller added a second goal just before half-time, glancing in Matthijs de Ligt’s screaming volley, Kane capped a rapid counterattack by tapping in Leroy Sané’s parried shot, and frankly Bayern could have scored a fourth or fifth. But more important was the rediscovery of what you may as well call their old arrogance: the swagger and stillness and sense of certainty that has been so conspicuously absent of late. The great Bayern teams killed without thinking. Everyone knew their jobs. Everyone knew how it was going to end.
“We managed to be focused and disciplined over 90 minutes,” said Tuchel, walking with a slight limp after kicking a box during his pre‑match team talk and breaking his toe. “We didn’t do any crazy things either, we waited until the gaps opened up and had a better understanding of when to accelerate and when to take risks. In the end it looked easier than it was.”
Equally, let’s be real: Lazio were pretty disappointing here. Maurizio Sarri’s gameplan had carefully nursed them through 130 minutes of this tie, and it was going well enough: defend in numbers, counterpunch through the rapid Felipe Anderson and the bustling Immobile. But once they were required to make the running, they seemed to evaporate into the night. Anderson was a one-man whirlwind on the right wing and Luis Alberto was probably the busiest of their midfield three, but they ended the night without a single shot on target.
In desperation Sarri made a triple substitution on the hour, withdrawing the captain, Immobile (206 goals for Lazio in 329 games), for the Argentinian forward Taty Castellanos (two goals in 25 games). And really this was a kind of tell, redolent of the way in which Lazio have struggled to change gears this season, to find different ways of winning. No team in Serie A this season has earned fewer points from losing positions.
But as Lazio tried to open the game out, pushing the full-backs higher and trying to play more ambitiously through midfield, something just felt off. The spacing was all wrong, the relationships were all wrong, and suddenly Bayern were back in their comfort zone: winning the ball high and rampantly feasting on the open spaces.
For Bayern, tougher tests undoubtedly lie ahead. Too many of their big players – Joshua Kimmich and Manuel Neuer spring to mind – are still bumbling along, putting in barely adequate performances. The defensive pairing of De Ligt and Eric Dier look vulnerable against teams who run at them with pace. But while there is still light, there is still hope.
“Nights like this can really change the season,” Kane said. And for Bayern this was a night for healing, for turning the page, for fleetingly dreaming themselves kings again.
