His team courageously, stubbornly, managed to hold off the visiting champions until a Joshua Kimmich strike in the 88th minute but for Bruno Labbadia, the game was up long before. The Hamburger SV coach knew full well that he had been cynically cast in the role of the patsy on Saturday afternoon, heaved on to the bench by the club manager Dietmar Beiersdorfer in order to fall down a final time and thus smooth the passage for the appointment of his successor, Markus Gisdol.
Labbadia, a man high on genuine passion and a bit of a cult hero with the supporters after he dramatically saved HSV from the drop in June 2015, threatened to get his last job wrong, by getting the right result, but Carlo Ancelotti’s team spared Beiersdorfer’s blushes with one of these typically late, lucky Bayern goals that we’ll see more of this season, as Pep Guardiola’s all-conquering, frighteningly reliable possession-machine is being replaced by a more haphazard, artisanal production process that relies on the individual quality of the workforce.
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