Pep Guardiola said his team needed to play with their hearts and their heads but they failed to activate the latter – and they also lacked legs.
It only took five minutes for Barcelona to expose Bayern’s deficiencies. Ivan Rakitic left poor Xabi Alonso panting in his wake as he scampered unhindered into the box to collect a through-ball from Dani Alves. Manuel Neuer saved but it was clear that Barcelona would be back unless Bayern found a way to conceal their fragility and immobility.
Perhaps they were counting on Barcelona being even more brittle at the back? In which case Mehdi Benatia’s goal in the seventh minute, thanks to negligent marking by Barcelona, merely hardened Bayern’s misguided ways.
It was not magical technique so much as shrewd thinking that enabled Barcelona to equalise eight minutes later.
Lionel Messi, a poet of a player with a gift for composing serenely amid hasty throngs, drifted into solitude 30 yards out and bisected Bayern’s static defence with a straight-line pass. Benatia, having figured out too late where Luis Suárez had got to, ran back like a man who suddenly realised he had left his front door wide open but had no chance of catching the Uruguayan. Neuer also had no chance of giving his team-mates another reprieve when Suárez showed the presence of mind to circumvent him with an unselfish pass to Neymar, who had expertly exploited the offside law’s bias in forwards’ favour.
Barcelona did not need to be particularly smart to end the final argument.
The only way in which Messi needed to use his head in the 29th minute was to flick the ball on in midfield as Benatia and Bastian Schweinsteiger again lost their bearings.
Suddenly Suárez was clean through, just as he had been from a similar flick-on early in the first leg – Neuer rescued Bayern on that occasion with a fabulous close-range save – this time Suárez did not give the goalkeeper an opportunity to do so, swinging the ball across to Neymar, who had time to take it down and find the net from 10 yards.
The only merciful aspect about the extent to which Bayern’s backline was off the pace was that Jérôme Boateng was barely in camera shot every time Barcelona raced through the Bayern defence and was thus spared the indignity of being the unwitting star of another internet meme featuring a floundering Bayern defender.
That dishonour fell instead to Benatia, although, in fairness, the delicious reverse flick with which Suárez baffled him in the 33rd minute would have thrown even Sherlock Holmes off the scent, being a diversion so fiendishly brilliant it was part Messi, part Moriarty.
Barcelona were at times magnificent, but it was inexcusable for a club of Bayern’s stature and a manager of Guardiola’s obsession with detail that at time they looked like a rabble. A shame in the other sense too, since much of their attacking play was admirable, though it was fitting that in the first half that the best of it came from a player reared in Barcelona.
What a pity that both of Thiago Alcântara’s delightful runs were followed by lame finishes, first from Robert Lewandowski and then from Thomas Müller.
Both of those players did generally play well, however, and were rewarded with goals in the second half.
True, Barcelona had begun winding down by that stage, but Javier Mascherano would be kidding no one if he tried to claim he was not doing his utmost to stop Lewandowski when the Pole bamboozled him by rolling the ball this way and that before curling it into the net from the edge of the area.
Arjen Robben and Franck Ribéry would likely have augmented Bayern’s attack but Guardiola’s side created plenty of chances anyway, and the headless and legless way they defended in both games suggested that the injuries to David Alaba and Holger Badstuber were more significant, along with a defective plan.
