Bayern Munich and Lyon play in the UEFA Champions League semi-finals in Lisbon on Wednesday. The winner will be seen on Sunday in Paris St.-Germain in the final of the competition, the richest club championship of European football.
TV: Wednesday’s game will be broadcast in the United States via the streaming service of CBS All Access, and in Spanish on Univision.
18 ‘
Gnabry gives Bayern a 1-0 lead!
That looked much easier than it was. Gnabry correlates a long, running pace effortlessly to the right gain and, feeling space inside, jumps into it. A few touches give him an opening, and just as the ball rolls over the top of the penalty area, he grabs a shot with left foot that screams past Lopes. Great goal, and Bayern leads, 1-0.
17 ‘
Ekambi from the post!
First, he turned Alphonso Davies at the byline. Then the ball pulls on his left foot, but his ripped shot hits the post and right back to him. Beautiful play.
11 ‘
Now it’s Bayern’s turn. Goretzka misbehaves from close range.
A beautiful touch by Lewandowski, the Bayern goalkeeper, leaves Goretzka cut in at the back to the right. But he fluffs on his shot, barely smells the ball, and rolls harmlessly over the goal.
Harmful, that is, until Lopes realizes that it can just sneak into the left post and he dives to push it out for a corner.
6 ‘
Memphis only breaks in! But his shot is wide.
A big mistake by Bayern – shadows of Barcelona – when a ball from deep in midfield splits the center-backs and jumps Memphis Depay directly into the middle, sprinting out of the center circle. But Depay takes too much approach to try to round the massive Neuer, sending his falling shot to the right.
Enormous early chance there.
3 ‘
Bayern already stretches the field.
Gaps fit the Bundesliga champions, and so in the opening minutes they immediately tried to stretch Lyon wide and from side to side. But Rudi Garcia is not crazy, and Lyon does not fall for this. It is quite possible that they have seen the Barcelona tape and know what happens when you do.
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It is only a few months ago that Jean-Michel Aulas declared that this would all be quite impossible. The French football authorities had declared an end to the Ligue 1 season – with 10 games left – in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, and Aulas, the owner and president of Olympique Lyonnais, was singing.
Not only would the cancellation cost French clubs revenue, time and players, Aulas said, not only would it deprive his team of the chance to improve on their status – it sat seventh in the league table when the season ended, which means that it for the prospect of a first season out of European competition in more than a decade – but it would hinder the efforts of the two French representatives of the Champions League.
Aulas’ theory was simple, and it was widely held: Lyon and Paris St.-Germain, the two French teams still alive in the knockout rounds, would return to the cold of the Champions League, weakened with ring rust, against opponents in the full flush of the season. “In August, we will meet teams in these leagues who can prepare better than us,” he had said in the spring.
On Tuesday night, PSG became the first French team to reach a Champions League final since Monaco in 2004. On Wednesday, Lyon can take part in their big rival, although it is the rather intimidating stronghold of Bayern Munich – fresh from an 8-win victory -2 against Barcelona – stand in the way. Never a man to let facts get in the way of his opinion, Aulas suggested, after PSG advised to eliminate Atalanta and shocked Lyon Manchester City in the quarter-finals, that a “little luckHad the competitive advantage that the French teams had removed.
Lyon will need that to hold this evening. Bayern have looked imperial since the restart of European football – since Hansi Flick took the lead in November, in fact – and culminated in that cold-blooded demolition of Barcelona. The general rule of European football is that the team with the bigger resources and the better players will win, and in that sense this is as big a mismatch as PSG’s win over RB Leipzig on Tuesday.
Lyon are at least an outsider who can rejoice more easily than Leipzig. While the pugnacious Aulas is not what you might call universal lovers in France, he has transformed his club into something of a model that others can follow. And he did it not once, but twice. First, around the turn of the century, when smart recruiting, especially from South America, Lyon turned into the leading light in French football. And now, when its productive academy and its emphasis on youth has earned it a reputation as one of the premier factories of Europe.
Houssem Aouar and Maxence Caqueret are the two crown jewels; both will have to use this game when their star bursts, the moment they announce themselves to the world, when Lyon is the only chance.
The lineups are out.
The Bayern team is, as usual, formidable:
Manuel Neuer; Joshua Kimmich, Jérôme Boateng, David Alaba, Alphonso Davies; Thiago Alcantra, Leon Goretzka, Ivan Perisic, Thomas Müller, Serge Gnabry; Robert Lewandowski.
It’s the same starting lineup that beat Chelsea (4-1) and Barcelona (8-2) to get here.
Lyon are also clinging to what has worked in the past, meaning Moussa Dembélé, the man of the match in the win over Manchester City in the quarter-finals, will start on the bench.
Lyon’s line-up:
Anthony Lopes; Leo Dubois, Marcelo, Jason Denayer, Marçal; Houssem Aouar, Maxence Caqueret, Bruno Guimaraes, Maxwel Cornet, Memphis Depay, Karl Toko Ekambi.
Today’s referee is a Spaniard, Antonio Mateu Lahoz. He has a reputation as a chatty ref.
Look at the wings.
With Lyon in a 3-5-2 formation, with wings ready to fall back or push forward, and Bayern in their usual 4-2-3-1, there should be a lot of action today – and chance -.
Davies and Kimmich of Bayern, for example, can be devastating if they push forward on the attack, which they can be expected to do liberally. That could create some opposite opportunities for Lyon if they move forward, however.
Of course, if they come forward and do what they did against Barcelona – scoring goals or scoring them in league – then the field on the counter could be the last in Lyon’s sense. This Davies run alone, to set Kimmich up against Barcelona, is enough to keep nights defenders up.
That said, Bayern’s high back line – a hallmark of his approach from the foot forward – saw it slip out a few times early against Barcelona. It was fortunately unbeaten, and the route was soon on, but Manchester City scored first against Manchester City by taking advantage of a similar opportunity. That it also knows if any team that the aggressive nature of an opponent can be turned on.
A good first name read on Hansi Flick from Bayern.
The Houssem Aouar of Lyon has been here before. As a boy.
Aouar, the promising 22-year-old Lyon midfielder, has grown up at the club. He joined Lyon in 2009 as an 11-year-old amateur, and over the years he has developed into one of the club’s top talents since making his debut as an 18 – year – old in 2017.
He wears the no. 8 jersey, which was given to him when her former wearer, Corentin Tolisso, joined Bayern Munich three years ago. But that, he noted this morning on social media, is not his only connection with Bayern-Lyon.
A decade ago, as a 12-year-old, Aouar wrote on his social media accounts, he was one of the youth players selected to wear one of the banners on the field when Lyon reached their only previous semi-final of ‘ celebrated the Champions League.
Bayern Munich won that day, on a hat-trick (left foot, right foot, header) from Ivica Olic, and advanced to the final, where they lost to José Mourinho’s Inter Milan. Now Aouar has a chance to write another story.
Bayern has a family tree championship. But Lyon also has a proud history.
Bayern Munich are chasing their sixth European title this week, and its first since 2013, when Robert Lewandowski was a defeated Dortmund striker in the final at Wembley. It has just won its eighth straight Bundesliga title, it has stars young (Joshua Kimmich, Alphonso Davies) and old (Thomas Müller, Lewandowski, Manuel Neuer), not to mention a roster full of reliable role players and differentiators in reserve. And it has won 31 of its 34 games since Hansi took over Flick in November. It is, in almost every respect, what a candidate for the Champions League title should look like.
But Lyon is no slouch. A seven-time French champion, it was a regular in the Champions League for a decade in the early years of the century, and it even made it to the semi-finals in 2010, when it was postponed by – surprise! – Bayern Munich. And although Lyon were both opportunistic and happy to beat Manchester City in the quarter-finals on Saturday, it has formed itself into a defensively solid, offensively dangerous squad under Rudi Garcia. And now the roll, his early season fight and his fights with his own fans have long been forgotten. Having already beaten Cristiano Ronaldo and Juventus, it will not creep in for Bayern. Or at least it should not.
What comes next?
Wednesday’s winner will face Paris St.-Germain, who beat RB Leipzig in Tuesday’s first semi-final, in Sunday’s final at Benfica’s Estádio da Luz.
The game will be PSG’s first appearance in the final, culminating in a year-long project by its Qatari owners to build a world-class team. It has not always gone well for PSG But as Rory wrote on Tuesday night:
After all the wrong turns, all the hearts and disappointment, the humiliations and the turnaround and the gut-wrenching collapses, Paris St.-Germain has finally done what it was designed and built to do.
This year marked PSG’s first appearance in the semi-finals since 1995 – long before both the arrival of the club’s Qatari owners and even the birth of Kylian Mbappé – and the club has developed a habit in recent years of falling short when confronted by one of European giants. But it has everything it takes to compete this time around: the most expensive player in the world at Neymar, probably his best young player at Mbappé, and the craving and drive and happiness that has been lacking in the past.
Sunday will be the last test against a traditionally rich opponent of a project that has been in the mark for years.
