Bayern Munich are enjoying a fantastic season. Considering just how far ahead they are in the Bundesliga right now and just how incredibly strong they’ve looked in the Champions League, one would suggest Pep Guardiola’s side were on course for another historic treble-winning season.
However, like any team across the world, we must take the good with the bad. For any team to continue growing, they must learn from their mistakes. Rather than just revel in the good times, Bayern must also consider what went wrong when things didn’t go their way.
As such, today we’ve jotted down the top five lowest moments in Bayern’s otherwise perfect season.
When the name Shakhtar Donetsk gets brought up among Bayern fans these days a cheeky smile tends to follow, yet we mustn’t forget the manner in which the team truly struggled with their Ukrainian opposition in the first leg.
Bayern have looked suspect on the road in the Champions League this season—with a defeat to Manchester City perhaps looking like the more notable result of the campaign so far—and the Ukrainian giants certainly made Guardiola’s team sweat in a game they should have won comfortably.
A game that will have little bearing on the rest of this season, but certainly not one Guardiola will look back on with much enjoyment.
Although it seems like an entire season ago, Guardiola’s initial plans for his defence were based around Jerome Boateng and Javi Martinez playing the ball out from the back-line with pace and precision.
This all came to an abrupt halt in the very first competitive fixture of the 2014/15 season when the towering Spaniard lasted just 31 minutes against Borussia Dortmund in the DFB Pokal Super Cup.
It was later diagnosed that Martinez had ruptured a cruciate ligament and would be out for much of the season. Dortmund won the first test of the season and the Bayern coach was force to bring in Mehdi Benatia as cover and return to the drawing board.
The most recent event to populate today’s list, the defeat to Borussia Moenchengladbach once again offered a suggestion that Bayern aren’t beyond criticism and indeed defeat to some of the better teams in Germany right now.
It falls in line with a defeat to Wolfsburg earlier in the season, along with Guardiola’s team struggle with the likes of Schalke and Dortmund as well. Although the three points lost may seem like the immediate fall out to such a result, the ramiifications of what it in fact represents may echo on throughout the rest of this season.
Gladbach are the recent team to prove that Bayern can indeed bleed.
Philipp Lahm may be fighting fit now but many Bayern fans will be watching over their club captain in the hope of wrapping him in cotton wool after each game.
The German World Cup winner started the season with a fantastic string of performances, but was sidelined against Eintracht Frankfurtin early November with a Malleolar fracture and as such set Bayern’s midfield into total disarray.
Bayern don’t look like themselves without Lahm, as we’ve seen from time to time over the course of his three-month absence.
Bayern have had a few dodgy results and some bitter injuries to contend with this season but no day will have shook fans to their very core quite like the defeat to Wolfsburg in January.
Dieter Hecking’s side were simply outstanding that day and played Guardiola’s team off the park. From Kevin de Bruyne’s playmaking to Bas Dost’s volley for the second goal, the Wolves looked like a team that could compete with the reigning German champions. This was the day Wolfsburg declared their intent of one day displacing Bayern and they did it superbly.
A thought many fans in Bavaria will consider at length over the summer months and ahead of next season.
