Tuesday night’s dramatic DfB Pokal defeat at third-tier Saarbrücken was bad news for Bayern Munich. It was even worse news for Borussia Dortmund. Thomas Müller’s Instagram apology to the club’s fans – including for a failure to properly acknowledge those who travelled at the end – felt significant and so it proved.
This was no real Klassiker. It was no real contest. It was a one-sided rant of a reply, an unloading of frustration and anger, aided and abetted by a BVB who were not even a pale imitation of a challenger. “We made it too easy for them,” lamented their sporting director Sebastian Kehl. It was hard to argue. His team conceded two goals inside the opening eight-and-a-half minutes that should never have been possible. With barely two minutes on the clock Nico Schlotterbeck allowing himself to be given the slip by Dayot Upamecano – amusingly, straight after the grinning former had engaged the latter in chat as they waited for the corner to come in, presumably in an attempt to break his concentration – who headed in. Then the home side left themselves open to a counter-attack – to Bayern of all teams, a gobbler of such opportunities – at the end of which Leroy Sané laid a gift-wrapped chance on for the waiting Harry Kane. In double quick time Dortmund were two down and the evening had reached a premature denouement.
For them, at least. From the point when he made it 2-0 this was Kane’s night. If the opening weeks of his Bayern career have illustrated in glorious technicolour just how perfectly club and player are made for each other, answering one another’s prayers, this was the apex of the coronation. The England captain’s hat-trick took him to 15 goals in his opening 10 games, the best goalscoring start of a player in Bundesliga history.
When Robert Lewandowski beat Gerd Müller’s single-season Bundesliga goalscoring record in 2021, notching his 41st of the campaign with the very last kick of 2020-21, it was epochal. Müller’s record had always been assumed as one of those that would stand for ever. Now, two-and-a-half years after it was surpassed, Kane is threatening it already. If he continues at his current pace, he is on course to score 51. Thomas Müller’s latest dad joke, for the benefit of Bayern’s in-house media as Kane left the field with the matchball (“you’re going to run out of room in your hotel room!”) after Kane’s third hat-trick of the season already, rang long and true.
If Bayern were determined to right a wrong from midweek, then Kane was their perfect instrument of vengeance. He had, controversially, stayed in an unaccustomed position on the bench for the duration of the defeat at Saarbrücken, even as his team spurned chance after chance. With even 10 minutes of Kane at the end of that Pokal match, it feels as if Bayern would still be in it. Yet the hangover from that provoked a best Bayern display of the season in which results have come, but convincing performances have not always.
The baggage was clear, mainly through the prism of their coach’s demeanour. Thomas Tuchel was spiky in his pre-match interview with Sky, giving terse answers and beckoning over to the Sky panel before caustically declaring that maybe viewers would “rather hear from the experts.” Again he bristled afterwards, grudgingly accepting the praise of Lothar Matthäus and company for Bayern’s display “despite [my] falling out with the team,” after strong words at the training ground between players and staff in the light of the Pokal team were reported.
It was an interesting fight for Tuchel to pick. Much of his work is to be admired – the express integration of Kane, the dazzling form of Sané, the ability to pick up results without playing particularly well – and most reasonable observers would conclude that recruitment missteps, rather than anything the man on the bench has done, are at the source of lingering concerns. Yet there is still that very Tuchel-esque atmosphere of something waiting to blow at some point.
That will perhaps be of some comfort for Dortmund, who would have to look pretty hard to take positives from this. The look on the face of Edin Terzić in the opposite dugout was one of disappointed acceptance, rather than despair. Perhaps there is a state of being desensitised to the setback. In the 10 Klassikers since BVB beat Bayern 3-2 in this fixture in November 2018, Die Schwarzgelben have not won a single one, losing nine. It is damning, and never for an instant looked like changing here.
Yet when Kehl made a point of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater (‘we were unbeaten in 17 games before this and I’m not going to let it be said that everything is in ruins now”), he had justification. It was not the April humbling at Allianz Arena that swung last year’s title, with Dortmund’s fate in their own hands on the final day and, one suspects, it will not be the results between these two that will decide the fate of the Meisterschale this time around either. Bayern could hand out another hiding in the return fixture in April and still find a way to let the championship squirm from their grasp elsewhere should they not address a few fundamental (mainly defensive) problems.
What is clear is that Kane has been the catch-all solution that last season’s disjointed effort was crying out for. There are cracks to paper over but for now, he looks like he has enough plaster and filler to last the season.
Darmstadt 1-2 VfL Bochum, Union Berlin 0-3 Eintracht Frankfurt, Freiburg 3-3 Mönchengladbach, Hoffenheim 2-3 Leverkusen, Mainz 2-0 RB Leipzig, Köln 1-1 Augsburg, Dortmund 0-4 Bayern, Wolfsburg 2-2 Werder, Heidenheim 2-0 VfB Stuttgart
Talking points
• What Bayern aren’t, for now, is top. Leverkusen remain in first despite making heavy weather of a win at Hoffenheim, letting a two-goal lead slip mainly through a Lukas Hradecky brainfreeze before the inevitable Alex Grimaldo rode to the rescue with the winner, his second of the match. Xabi Alonso’s assistant Sebastian Parilla was widely celebrated after the first, with Alonso and sporting director Simon Rolfes underlining the work that Parrilla puts into practising Grimaldo’s deadly set-pieces.
• “Union complete the dirty dozen”, as Berliner Morgenpost put in their headline and “simply have to talk about a relegation battle” in the words of their captain Christopher Trimmel after their capitulation at home to Eintracht Frankfurt, their 12th loss in a row. At any other club coach Urs Fischer’s tenure would be hurtling to an end. At Union, the fans serenaded him as a FußballGott, showing support he and the team will need this week ahead of visits to Napoli and to Leverkusen.
• Mainz’s dreadful start to the season saw off highly-rated coach Bo Svensson this week, who quit his post. So what happened next? A first win of the season of course, beating RB Leipzig no less, with a Jae Sung Lee diving header getting them on their way under the temporary guidance of ex-Huddersfield boss Jan Siewert. Temporary for now at least. “Jan is certainly someone who will appear in the Bundesliga sooner or later,” iconic sporting director Christian Heidel told Sport 1’s Doppelpass on Sunday. “Perhaps with us.” That would be a very Mainz-y solution, following in the footsteps of Tuchel, current sporting director Martin Schmidt and Sandro Schwarz. Bochum also got a first victory this season, thanks to a double from Takuma Asano away at Darmstadt.
| Pos | Team | P | GD | Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bayer Leverkusen | 10 | 20 | 28 |
| 2 | Bayern Munich | 10 | 31 | 26 |
| 3 | Stuttgart | 10 | 14 | 21 |
| 4 | Borussia Dortmund | 10 | 5 | 21 |
| 5 | RB Leipzig | 10 | 16 | 20 |
| 6 | Hoffenheim | 10 | 3 | 18 |
| 7 | Eintracht Frankfurt | 10 | 6 | 17 |
| 8 | Freiburg | 10 | -6 | 14 |
| 9 | Wolfsburg | 10 | -1 | 13 |
| 10 | Augsburg | 10 | -3 | 12 |
| 11 | Borussia M'gladbach | 10 | -4 | 10 |
| 12 | Werder Bremen | 10 | -4 | 10 |
| 13 | Heidenheim | 10 | -7 | 10 |
| 14 | VfL Bochum | 10 | -14 | 8 |
| 15 | Darmstadt | 10 | -18 | 7 |
| 16 | Union Berlin | 10 | -11 | 6 |
| 17 | Mainz | 10 | -13 | 6 |
| 18 | Cologne | 10 | -14 | 5 |
