Bayern Munich v Manchester United
Tuesday, 30th March 2010 – KO: 19:45
The German Bundesliga has always struck me as a funny old League. Wolfsburg were last year’s Champions with Schalke 04 finishing in 8th place. At the time of writing, Schalke 04 lead the Bundesliga whilst Wolfsburg are down in ninth place.
As for Bayern Munich, they won the Bundesliga in 2007/08, finished second last season and are currently in second place again.
What I suppose this shows is that the Bundesliga is mental but Bayern Munich are pretty consistent and over the years have probably been recognised as the standard bearer for German football.
Our own record against Bayern is pretty mixed on the whole. We have met them seven times but have only won one of them (can anyone remember that game? what happened?). We did, of course, have them in the group stage of the Champions League that year and the two games between us produced some pretty decent matches with the two games finishing 2-2 and 1-1.
Bayern got some measure of revenge for the 99 CL Final when they knocked us out of the CL at this stage in 2001 with a 3-1 aggregate scoreline.
All of this is a long, long time ago though and it is over eight years since we last met them.
We go into this game on a great run of form. The 3-1 defeat at the hands of Everton in the Premier League being by far the stand-out result in a pretty long streak of victories.
Bayern, by contrast, come into this game having lost their previous two matches. I also think they can count themselves extremely fortunate to even be in this Champions League quarter final. They won their first leg against Fiorentina 2-1 thanks to a late, late goal which was a mile offside and then lost the return leg 3-2 which of course meant that they scraped through on the away goal rule.
It is worth noting that Fiorentina are currently in eighth place in Serie A, a long, long way behind the likes of AC Milan.
Fergie rested Rooney in the game against Bolton but I fully expect him to be back for this one and Rio Ferdinand who was also rested should resume his partnership with Vidic in the centre of defence.
There have been all kinds of reports that either or both of Ribery and Robben could be missing for this one due to injury but reading between the lines, I would say that Ribery will definitely start and it is Robben who is the doubt.
It’s going to be interesting to see if they do play and who Fergie chooses to put up against them.
Whichever way I look at this one, I can only see Bayern as distinct underdogs here. They do have some great attacking players but so do we. They have some decent midfielders, we have some very good midfielders. They look a bit suspect at the back, we have a very solid defence.
If Bayern can somehow sneak a goal and keep us out for ninety minutes then they have a chance here tonight but as far as I am concerned it all depends on how ambitious Fergie and the boys are here tonight. We could put this one to bed right here tonight and make the return leg almost a formality. Or we could settle for a score draw which is often as good as a win in the away leg.
I think we need to go for this one tonight. With Chelsea now out of the Champions League, they have a slight advantage in the Premier League as their players can have more rest between games. If we can put a couple past Bayern tonight, Fergie might even have the option of giving a couple of breather in the return leg.
The bet is going to be 3 points United to Win @ 2.41 with Canbet.
| Result & Review | ||
Bayern Munich |
2 – 1 |
Manchester United
|
| Franck Ribery, 77 Ivica Olic, 90 |
Wayne Rooney, 2 | |
Review to follow…
Seriously bad luck for us yesterday. =/
I think MU deserved to concede after losing the ball countless times, but i think that we did not deserve to lose the match.
Van der sar was blameless once again after saving a barrage of goal scoring opportunities, but i think we were lucky not to concede earlier on in the game as well. It well could have been a very high scoring game.
Now that Rooneys injured, i think confidence will be down and now that we’ll be playing against Chelsea in the weekend i think we are seriously screwed.
I have not written my post-match review yet because I always like to watch a replay before I do but I really can’t bring myself to watch this abysmal display again.
I have never seen us give the ball away so many times and it wasn’t just one or two of the players who were at it, they were all terrible.
The fact that Rooney was injured in the same dying seconds that brought about Bayern’s winner was just some kind of sick joke the footballing gods like to have amongst themselves from time to time.
If there is any good that can be taken from the game then it is the fact that we played probably as poorly as we have played for years and still managed to come away with a scoreline that is not beyond our ability to turn around.
The Rooney situation is a real kick in the teeth though and is it just me or are other Reds feeling a bit pissed off that the papers are all saying things like “but the good news is that he should be fine for England”??!!!
The good news (yes there’s one!) is that Bayern too will face a title-decider against Schalke on Saturday…. . I think Fergie will go for the draw against Chelsea… and we can grind out a 1-0 or 2-0 win against Bayern even without Rooney… Let’s hope that Berbatov’s rich experience in German football will give him an edge over the Bayern defence…