If you thought that was good, wait until you have done it at Ewood Park. While everyone else struggled to compose themselves after watching a modern classic unfold between Bayern Munich and Real Madrid, it was Vincent Kompany who supplied the cooling balm. He had just taken Bayern back to the Champions League semi-finals in scintillating fashion, another feat to justify the decision to take him from Burnley two years ago. Not many managers have breathed such rarefied air within days of turning 40. For Kompany, though, it sat snugly alongside the snappy Lancashire climate.
“I remember we beat Blackburn twice with Burnley,” he said, having been asked whether Wednesday night marked a crowning achievement in his coaching career. “Nobody in this room will want to compare it with the game today, but it was amazing. I experienced so much as a player and that was incredible. For Bayern this game is an amazing feeling, but I don’t think you wait for Real Madrid to say ‘this is the best’. You have to get it from other things as well.”
In fairness the second of those victories against Blackburn, 1-0 on their rivals’ turf, gave Burnley the Championship title in 2022-23. Nobody needs a nuanced understanding of internecine disputes in the north-west to grasp the emotion associated with that. Kompany also referenced defeating Standard Liège while in charge of Anderlecht and the point was simple enough: everything, no matter what, means the most when you are immersed in it.
It is an attitude that should help ground Bayern, free-scoring and fizzing with confidence, when they approach their tantalising double header with Paris Saint-Germain. There had been signs Real were flagging in the 20 minutes before Luis Díaz and Michael Olise, with stunning displays of initiative, left the visitors rueing Eduardo Camavinga’s needless red card. Perhaps Bayern, with their added depth and physicality, would have seen the task through in extra time regardless. But ultimately they won because, in the style of their manager, they were capable of blocking out distractions and operating with a clarity Real could not match.
“We didn’t get frustrated with some of the decisions we were not happy about in the first half,” Kompany said, presumably referring to the free-kick from which Arda Guler scored Real’s second goal, and an alleged foul on Josip Stanisic in the buildup to Kylian Mbappé’s third. He was booked for his own protests about the latter but Bayern gathered themselves. “We stayed focused on our game. That was a good part of the game management in the second half from us.”
Compare that with the speed at which Real, for whom there is never a failing too intrinsic to lay at someone else’s door, fell apart. Even before Camavinga’s dismissal, they had begun to fray. Antonio Rüdiger resembled a coiled spring from the moment he engaged in an unseemly confrontation with Stanisic before half-time, appearing to shout in his face and prompting the Bayern player to suggest he had been insulted. “Maybe he’s man enough to admit everything,” Stanisic said. Real’s post-match hounding of the referee, Slavko Vincic, culminating in a red card for Guler, did a gross disservice to the best footballing spectacle Europe has seen all season.
After the match there was some sympathy, even on Bayern’s side, for Camavinga. The visitors’ unconfirmed suspicion, with which Stanisic concurred, was that Vincic was temporarily unaware he had already booked the substitute. Perhaps he would otherwise have looked more leniently on Camavinga’s daft delaying of a Bayern free-kick. But Camavinga had, unlike Bayern, wandered from the job: he had let silliness interfere with the simple act of playing football, placing his own destiny and that of his team in a third party’s hands.
By contrast Bayern’s relentlessness, embodied by the dizzying shifts put in by Díaz and Olise on the wings, spoke of steely focus. It is no fluke that they have already broken the record for Bundesliga goals scored in a season. Kompany has bred a side that refuses to call time once the scoreline begins to widen and it has equipped them to persist when the going is tougher. Díaz’s shooting boots had been absent before his slightly deflected goal but he ran Real’s right side into the ground; the brilliant Olise had been coming closer and closer from his perch on Bayern’s right, each near miss simply breeding resolve to go again.
Kompany would expect nothing else whether in Blackburn, Brussels or Bremen. It will be the competition’s showpiece occasion of the year when Bayern and PSG face off; a de facto final unless Arsenal or Atlético Madrid discover hitherto uncharted dimensions.
On the face of things, a sodden skirmish in England’s second tier may hold less appeal than the chance to salute Olise’s rare blend of grace and power. It was a less celebrated winger, Manuel Benson, who scored the decider in that confirmation of Burnley’s first place. Three years later Kompany stands on the verge of continental supremacy but, for him and this edition of Bayern, all successes are created equally.
