I thought that was an excellent game. Bayern deserved to win it over the piece. I see a couple of mentions on the thread about Robben’s winner - I didn’t think that was a mishit at all. Brilliant tempo to the game and the ref’s willingness to allow it flow added to it. Dortmund could perhaps count themselves unfortunate over a couple of decisions though - a potential second yellow card for Dante for the penalty and I thought Ribery could have been sent off for an elbow/arm in Lewandowski’s face in the first half. Martinez had a massive game for Bayern - he won back an incredible amount of ball as the game progressed and it gave them the platform to gradually get on top. Fair play to Robben for his perseverance too.
I take Braz’s point but I simply can’t turn over. It’s car crash stuff.
The brilliant Black Rebel Motorcycle Club play us out. 
Yeah that was a composed finish by Robben. Just strokes it in.
Agreed on those decisions though Lewandowski could also have been sent off for his stamp.
[quote=“Rocko, post: 777139, member: 1”]Yeah that was a composed finish by Robben. Just strokes it in.
Agreed on those decisions though Lewandowski could also have been sent off for his stamp.[/quote]
Bullshit it was a misskick
It was in its fuck.
Interesting from Robben on thought process of goal: “My first choice was actually to go past him on the left side but then he made a move and I could put it on the other side. He was on the wrong leg.”
Bit of history there. Subotic taunted Robben last year after he missed a penalty in a crucial league game between the two so a few of the Bayern lads obviously remembered that.
Bollix
The Lord teaches us to turn the other cheek Bandage. But yea, thanks for the heads up.
The auld FC Hollywood manager might be the right age to take over from Trap.
totally agree…Marintez has been a brilliant signing for bayern…exactly what they were missing in previous years…Barca must be seething they didn´t pay the fee…
how good could Robben have been if he had ever listened to a coach?..heruns into his own player´s space, misses so many chances but is so naturally talented that he keeps creating them…the one shot he kept on the deck went in - he usually hits them high and straight at the keeper…
[quote=“scumpot, post: 777272, member: 182”]totally agree…Marintez has been a brilliant signing for bayern…exactly what they were missing in previous years…Barca must be seething they didn´t pay the fee…
how good could Robben have been if he had ever listened to a coach?..heruns into his own player´s space, misses so many chances but is so naturally talented that he keeps creating them…the one shot he kept on the deck went in - he usually hits them high and straight at the keeper…[/quote]
There was talk last season that Martinez had opted against Real and Barca because they wanted him to play as a centre back who could step forward into midfield, a position he played for Athletic sometimes, and so he opted for Bayern where he’d be more pivotal in midfield.
Bayern were a bit unlucky with injuries and suspensions towards the end of last season - Alaba and Luiz Gustavo would have been fine alongside a fit Schweinsteiger. They’ve definitely strengthened that area with Martinez though and he was very influential last night. Alaba might be too good in midfield to keep playing left back in the long term but I’m sure they’ll figure something out with him.
Christ, Bayern are a particularly dislikeable bunch.
Decent article by Johnathon Wilson
[SIZE=6]The Question: what were the tactical trends of 2012-13?[/SIZE]
Bayern Munich have built on Barcelona’s tiki-taka in a season of forward thinking and creative holding
“The point of training,” César Luis Menotti said, “is to increase the speed at which one can be precise.” It is a truth that seems written into the internal rhythms of football: each new form is developed and modified, made faster, until it reaches a maximum pace at which a new innovation arises to replace it. [U]What Bayern Munich have done this season[/U][/URL] is to take the [URL=‘http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/barcelona’][U]Barcelona[/U] model and to improve it, not so much with technical innovation than with physical.
Barcelona were the first team fully to exploit the possibilities of the [U]modified offside law[/U]. It stretched the effective playing area, giving players more space, decreasing physical contact and so readmitting small, technically accomplished players to the game. With fouls increasingly drawing cards, it meant that the likes of Xavi, Andrés Iniesta and Lionel Messi could thrive playing a possession-based passing game that they coupled with a stifling pressing enabled by their supreme fitness.
But just because small players can do something, it does not mean that that same thing isn’t better done with big players, if they are capable of the same levels of technical expertise. Bayern perhaps haven’t hit quite the same levels of filigree passing as Barça at their peak, but they are not far off, and [U]what was striking in the Champions League semi-final[/U][/URL] was how tired – how weak – Barcelona looked. Of course, it is not entirely fair to compare a team on the rise with one coming to the end of its cycle – one is hungry, desperately eager for success, the other is sated, lacking the drive to suffer to stay in a game – but equally it can hardly be denied that Bayern’s players are bigger than Barça’s. (The issue of whether Barça are finished is a tricky one: history suggests great sides, once toppled, take time to recover, but the elite teams have never before had such [URL=‘http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2013/may/21/champions-league-super-clubs’][U]financial advantages as they do now[/U]; it seems likely that Barça’s fall will only be relative).
That [U]Borussia Dortmund[/U][/URL]'s pace and aggression [URL=‘http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2013/apr/24/champions-league-borussia-dortmund-real-madrid’][U]similarly unsettled Real Madrid in the semi-finals[/U] seemed to confirm the advantage the Bundesliga has in terms of physique. That’s not to say that pace will always overcome technique and it may be that Barça at their best would still have overcome Bayern at their best. All sides have an optimum rhythm, and the tiki-taka of Pep Guardiola’s side probably required a slower tempo than the fractionally more direct style of Bayern. It may also be that successful teams become more conservative – certainly Spain have under Vicente del Bosque – and that that slows the pace. Either way, the prospect of Bayern, already superb, developing further under Pep Guardiola, evolving a supercharged tiki-taka, is awe-inspiring.
But it would be wrong to portray Bayern’s triumph as a defeat for tiki-taka. Rather it is an evolution of tiki-taka. Like Barça, Bayern press high up the pitch (arguably Jupp Heynckes’s greatest achievement has been to persuade Arjen Robben and Franck Ribéry to perform their defensive duties diligently) and seek to control the ball. Over the past two seasons, in the top five leagues in Europe, only Barça have had higher possession and pass completion stats than Bayern. The basic philosophy is still one of bielsisme (the style of Athletic Bilbao’s Marcelo Bielsa), although the more direct architect of both is Louis van Gaal. The pressing, perhaps, is more focused – certainly that is true of Dortmund, who also play to the same basic philosophy – and the outlook more vertical (which actually makes it even more true to the ideals of Bielsa) than Barça’s but the central tenets are the same.
What Bayern also have is a greater variety of attacking options, something they showed against Barça. When two possession sides meet, obviously, only one can dominate the ball. Bayern accepted over the course of the semi-final that they would be the more reactive side, sitting deep and springing rapid counterattacks, something they could do because of the pace through the side and the capacity of Bastian Schweinsteiger, Dante [U]and, especially, Javi Martínez to release long passes[/U]. (Again, this shouldn’t necessarily be taken as a criticism of Barça: for four years they made Plan A so good it would have been a waste of effort to develop a Plan B; so good, in fact, that even Bayern decided to modify their approach against them). In that, the role of Mario Mandzukic, a player so fit that even Felix Magath seemed nonplussed by him, was vital.
And that hints at two other trends this season: the growing importance of the deep-lying midfielder as a playmaker and the increasing variety of the central striker.
That the holding player – or one of the two holding players – has a creative function is not exactly new but the implications of that do seem to have been particularly relevant this year. As Jürgen Klopp gleefully noted after Dortmund had had the better of Real Madrid in the group stage of the [U]Champions League[/U], if you shut down Xabi Alonso, the rest follows. Then he did it again in the semi-final. That Dortmund could not neutralise Martínez with the same efficiency was one of the reasons Bayern got the better of them in head to heads this season (a supremacy that was greater even than a record of three wins and two draws in five games suggests).
Ilkay Gündogan performed a similar role for Dortmund, receiving the ball deep and setting the tempo. Andrea Pirlo did the same for Juventus. Sergio Busquets does it for Barcelona and Michael Carrick for Manchester United. That’s one of the reasons the central creator now has a defensive role, which has been one of the impressive aspects of Juan Mata and Oscar for Chelsea this season. Midfields have never been so split – it’s common to think in four bands rather than three – and yet the need for universality, for holding players to create and for creative players to shut down, has never been greater.
But it is centre-forwards who are probably the most notable feature of this season. While Spain and Barcelona have shown it’s possible to play without a traditional striker at all, more traditional types have flourished. Perhaps [U]the most old-fashioned of the lot is Robert Lewandowski[/U], who in style resembles a cross between Ian Rush and a classic target man. In front of a fluent midfield he has been a reference, always pulling into the spaces between centre-backs and full-backs, yet also capable of playing with his back to goal, holding the ball up.
Radamel Falcao and Edinson Cavani, in slightly differing ways, are examples of complete centre-forwards, players who are gifted finishers but also have the creative ability to pull wide or drop deep, to generate chances themselves. Zlatan Ibrahimovic is a target man with the skills of a No10: forwards increasingly have to be a blend, capable of finishing and creating or at least finishing and holding the ball up. Some even don’t have to be that good at finishing. Mandzukic may have scored 15 goals in the Bundesliga this season but he is barely a striker at all in the conventional sense: rather he is a fearsome spearhead, driving defenders back to create space for the midfield and leading the press with terrifying energy.
Neither Mandzukic nor Lionel Messi are anything like the sort of forward who may have been typical 15 or 20 years ago, and yet they could hardly be more different from each other: the one neat and skilful, the other raw and aggressive. Yet both lead teams who ostensibly play to the same philosophy and – in a slightly crude way, for nobody would realistically suggest that Mandzukic is better than Messi – their differences highlight the contrast between Barça and Bayern: there are different interpretations of the general bielsista theory.
Good article at Scoreboard Journalism about Arjen Robben and the myth of his big game struggles:
Arjen Robben and The Big Match Fallacy
Arjen Robben has been one of the best and most consistent footballers in the world over the last 10 years or so but few see him that way. Why is this? Could it be that people are falling for the “Big Match Fallacy”?
The assessment of the quality of Robben prior to Saturday’s Champions League final against Borussia Dortmund was built on two matches; the 2010 World Cup final and the Champions League final of 2012. Due to missing a one-on-one with the goalkeeper in 2010 and a penalty in 2012, Robben had therefore been stereotyped as a player who can’t perform in the big matches. This article will attempt to put another side to the story.
2012 Champions League final – the penalty
The extra time penalty against Chelsea last year is one of 13 penalties taken by Arjen Robben in his career in league, Champions League and international matches. He has missed three, giving him a marginally above average success rate of 77%. The three missed penalties were all on target and therefore forced a save out of the opposing goalkeeper so his accuracy cannot be questioned. The idea that he missed because it was a big match conveniently ignores the fact that Robben scored from the spot a round earlier, during the second leg of the semi-final match at Real Madrid. That goal was critical as it brought the score back to 2-1 which is how it remained before Bayern won on penalties.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMV10c_SmDA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exco_lLAE3g
Not only that but Robben took another big match penalty eight years earlier. The Netherlands were in a shootout against Sweden at Euro 2004 and who should step up to take the decisive spot kick but Arjen Robben. He scored and the Dutch went through to the semi-finals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7G0ptxadWE
2010 World Cup final – the chance
This match was built up beforehand as a battle between Spain, the natural inheritors of the ‘totaal voetbal’ tag of the 1974 Dutch team, and the almost devilish 2010 Netherlands squad who would do anything to win. It seems to now be generally seen as football’s equivalent of the triumph of good over evil. There is plenty I could say about that too but let’s focus on the one incident which is relevant here. Just after an hour of the match, Arjen Robben was through on the goalkeeper:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjYKSyui1jI
The perspective that many football supporters have of this type of situation is that it is pretty much a guarantee to score. However, the average probability of scoring is more like 40%. Looking at this particular example in which one of the greatest goalkeepers in the world is involved, it is not clear what Robben actually does wrong. He sends Casillas the wrong way and the Spaniard only manages to save the ball with his toes. Spain got lucky.
So, a 13 season career comprising hundreds of matches and over 100 goals was condensed down to incidents in the two biggest matches of Robben’s career. With one it isn’t even clear that Robben does anything wrong except to play for the ‘wrong team’. As for the other, most players will miss around one in four penalties as Robben has. These incidents have been used to sum Robben up as a player who can’t perform in big matches. This is a wildly unfair assessment of a wonderful player.
I am not going to comment on the 2013 Champions League final because to do so would be just as churlish as those who seek to define a man’s career negatively by selecting a tiny proportion of it. Looking only at the big matches in a professional player’s time in the sport is a fallacy as the matches are an incredibly small sample of those played in total. It can only be justified by the claim that there are big match players and their opposite. These almost certainly do not exist and claims that they do are disproved almost every season with supposedly big match players not delivering and vice versa.
Arjen Robben should be regarded as one of the greatest players of this century. The reason he is not is, in part, to do with the Big Match Fallacy.
I agree with the broad thrust of the article, Rocko. But the author seems to pull some random figures to suit himself too. How does he derive a 40% probability of scoring the one-on-one, for example?
Didn’t Robben miss a late penalty against Dortmund last season which all but ended Bayerns league chances?
That aside I have always rated Robben and wouldn’t consider him a bottler.
[quote=“chewy louie, post: 779281, member: 1137”]Didn’t Robben miss a late penalty against Dortmund last season which all but ended Bayerns league chances?
That aside I have always rated Robben and wouldn’t consider him a bottler.[/quote]
Yeah, it was the one where Subotic goaded him afterwards. They lost it 1-0 if I recall correctly but I can’t remember if the penalty was missed before or after Dortmund scored.