Caretaker manager has brought in new rigour at Bayern, something lacking so far at Chelsea under Frank LampardBayern Munich may not have all the answers, but they know all the right questions. They can finish you in more ways than almost any other team on the planet. You play through the press and they smother you with possession. You lock the front gate and they find a way around the side. You sit deep and they weave their dainty triangles around you. You commit high and they make you turn and run. Thwart their slick passing game for one half, and they simply take you to pieces in the next.This, essentially, is what happened to Chelsea here: after maintaining a...
A December Copa del Rey thrashing for Club Deportivo Becerril ended with an open invite for their fans to visit the Reale Arena. At the weekend, two-thirds of a small town took them up on it At the end of training on Friday night, the players from Club Deportivo Becerril packed everything away and headed straight home. It was quarter past 10 and they had to be up early the next morning. Not long after 7.30am they were back, boarding the bus heading north, a four-hour journey ahead. One of the buses, that is. They had a game, but this time it wasn’t theirs. Instead, they were going to San Sebastián, singing songs all the way there, and the whole...
An indifferent victory over Paderborn raised the stakes for Hansi Flick, with a run in Europe potentially key to the interim manager keeping the jobIt’ll be alright on the night, they hope. With such a tight race at the top of the Bundesliga, there shouldn’t really have been time for a Bayern Munich dress rehearsal as they get set to restart their Champions League campaign. Yet what they served up on Friday night’s game against Paderborn felt suspiciously like one.There were plenty of fluffed lines. Bayern conceded not one but two improbable equalisers to visitors who were in the third tier the season before last, and whose annual playing budget is so small that nine first-teamers at the Allianz Arena...
The Atlético Madrid manager was at his whirling, grizzled best as his side claimed a first-leg advantage against LiverpoolJürgen Klopp stood and watched the referee pull the yellow card from his pocket, a symbol of his frustration, while to his right Diego Simeone raised the roof. Up and down the touchline Atlético Madrid’s manager went, wildly waving, clenching his fists, urging on the fans. Come on, he called, the coach conductor once more. Louder and louder they got, singing, flags waving, scarves whirling, all looking at him, all of them so alive. For Simeone, it has never been just about the players; it is about the place. And this place was his, like never before.With two minutes left, victory was...
Their 2-2 draw at the Bernabéu lifted Celta back out of the relegation zone; more importantly, it lifted them emotionallyFirst Joseph Aidoo took Zinedine Zidane down, then Denis Suárez and Santi Mina did the same to his defence. The first hit was harder but the second hurt more. There were 30 minutes left at the Bernabéu when everyone saw the Ghanaian tumble off the pitch and crash into the Real Madrid manager, knocking him to the floor and giving him a bloody lip; there were four minutes left when the Galician saw something none of them had, except the man born in the same province a month earlier. And before anyone knew it, so swift and smooth, via some hidden...