Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold. Neither can the left flank. Or the right. Or the heart of midfield come to think of it. On a rain-sodden night in north London Bayern Munich simply ran away with this game, scoring five times in 34 second-half minutes as the Tottenham defence collapsed like an overly dunked digestive.
What’s worse than losing 7-2 at home to Bayern Munich in the style of late-Wenger Arsenal? Losing 7-2 to Bayern Munich in the style of late-Wenger Arsenal when a late-Wenger Arsenal player scores four of the goal goals.
Serge Gnabry will take the headlines. He was impishly irresistible in that final half-hour, doing terrible things to the right side of the Spurs back four, feet barely seeming to dent the turf, repeatedly planting the ball in the corner of Hugo Lloris’s goal.
But this was a strange game too. Tottenham had actually taken the lead with 12 minutes gone. They kept the score at 1-1 right up to the final moments before half-time, Moussa Sissoko and Tanguy Ndombele combining to take a high-energy grip of midfield. At which point: enter Lewy.
For all Gnabry’s brilliance, it was Robert Lewandowski who provided the game’s decisive moment of incision. It was the goal of a genuine killer too, a moment that seemed to suck the air out of the stadium as the ball rippled and span and gurgled around in the corner of the net
It wasn’t the power of the shot, or some outrageous moment of highlights-reel skill. It was the way Lewandowski had seen, moved, turned, shot and even begun to celebrate his goal before the players around him had time to process what was about to happen.
Instead the white shirts saw a scramble at the edge of the box. There were collisions, tackles, a jockeying away from goal. The ball squirted into space. Corentin Tolisso, already lying on the grass appealing for a foul, hooked a leg at it. And then Lewandowski moved, taking two sniping steps back, wrapping a leg around the ball in the tiniest of spaces and spanking it back hard and low into the corner.
It was his 13th touch of the ball, right on half time. Three of those had been shots at goal. Six were completed passes. In between Lewandowski had contented himself with walking through his carefully defined territories around the box. And he does move in an extraordinary way. This is a man who slinks, who sidles, who meanders with the easy grace of a genuine athlete. For a while at Bayern his nickname was “The Body”, a dressing-room tribute to his muscle tone, his regal air, perhaps even the sense of a cold-eyed serial sniper at work.
If there is a criticism of Lewandowski it is that his game has been pared back, that he has become a refined, high-functioning machine, running through the same deadly patterns on the same patch of ground. At times Lewandowski tends to lurk like a ghost through the wall, getting closer, appearing in unexpected spaces, eventually materialising at the centre of things.
“I can win games on my own,” he said earlier this season, the implication being that he really shouldn’t have to, but he does. The goals here – the second a sublime, agreeably imperious steer into the corner as Tottenham collapsed around him – was his 14th in 10 games for Bayern.
Lewandowski does this. Every now and then he becomes, for a while, undeniably the best centre-forward in the world. He had a brilliant run under Pep Guardiola exactly four years ago, racking up 13 goals in six games and adding another layer of attacking possibility under a manager whose style might have been at odds with the Lewandowski lone-gun persona.
By now, aged 31, Lewandowski seems like a monument: immovable, unsmiling, fixated on his own returns. He was top scorer in the Polish third division 13 years ago. Right now he has 204 goals in 252 games for Bayern and has become a constant in this team; a link, just about, to that great Jupp Heynckes era, albeit he was playing for the other side at Wembley the last time they were champions of Europe.
Lewandowski didn’t have to win this game on his own. Gnabry took up the slack. Joshua Kimmich was irresistible in midfield and then on the right flank. This was a team clicking into a gear in real time, and led by that enduring rapier.
Niko Kovac had described Lewandowski and Harry Kane as the “best in the world” before this game, and it is a fascinating comparison. These are rare footballers, the pure centre-forward in a time of ever more diverse and shifting roles. Kane scored Tottenham’s second here from the spot, played well enough for 50 minutes, and after that watched as the structures behind him fell apart – led by that moment from Lewandowski.
