Hansi Flick is a players’ man and that meant his tenure at the club could not last longer than 18 exhilarating months
It had been a week heavy with a feeling of finality; first in Paris, then in Wolfsburg. Bayern Munich’s stride towards retaining the Champions League had come to a halt in the French capital, with Leon Goretzka’s withdrawal through injury perhaps the straw that broke the camel’s back in a campaign beset with personnel issues. Everything, this time, wasn’t enough.
After everything that happened in the two legs with Paris Saint-Germain – the setbacks, the comebacks, the good-but-not-quite-ruthless-enough performances – it felt good to move on with a relative test against one of the Bundesliga’s surprise packages, and a likely Champions League qualifier, in Lower Saxony on Saturday. Bayern performed to type at Wolfsburg, both in terms of Paris and in the framework of the personality of the Hansi Flick era’s team as a whole. They were sometimes irresistible, sometimes extraordinarily careless and never less than totally engaging.
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RB Leipzig 0-0 Hoffenheim, Union Berlin 2-1 Stuttgart, Augsburg 0-0 Arminia Bielefeld, Mönchengladbach 4-0 Eintracht Frankfurt, Freiburg 4-0 Schalke, Wolfsburg 2-3 Bayern Munich, Bayer Leverkusen 3-0 Köln
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