The Set: Bayern Munich 1–2 Cologne

I doubt many peo­ple expected Cologne’s visit to Allianz to pro­duce one of the best games of the week­end, but Christophe Daum and his scrappy side went to Munich (with only one win in their last 15 vis­its) and shocked the Bavar­i­ans. Two beau­ti­fully crafted coun­ters along with 45 min­utes of orga­nized defend­ing was the for­mula for the Billy Goats. But one can­not look past the egre­gious call made 13 min­utes into the game that would have changed the look of this game significantly.

How­ever, the poor deci­sion by the lines­man should not clear Bay­ern of a woe­ful dis­play in front of their faith­ful, and it should def­i­nitely not take away from an inspir­ing per­for­mance by Cologne. The win breaks a streak of four straight draws and sets the pro­moted side 10 points clear of the drop zone, which should clear them of any fur­ther wor­ries. Mean­while, the favorites lost their fifth game of the sea­son (3 more than the whole of last year) and they now have allowed as many goals as bottom-dwelling Glad­bach at home. Defense is a big issue, and it would seem that they might pos­si­bly be the least likely of the “group of six” to end up with the title come season’s end.

Seven Ran­dom Facts about Bay­ern and Cologne

1. Off­sides

So Babak Rafati inter­prets the rule for off­side dif­fer­ently? In his world, any pass, whether its from your own player, or glanced off say the head of a defender like Kevin McKenna, counts toward the attack­ing player’s posi­tion. Had Klose’s goal been allowed to stand, right­fully, how dif­fer­ent the game might have been. Cologne were play­ing a sim­ple counter attack, which could be expected of any under­dog away side. But had they been forced to chase the game, espe­cially so early on, this tac­tic would have had to been aban­doned and Bay­ern would have had more orga­ni­za­tion. Thus Cologne would not have been able to exploit the bevy of holes in the Klinsmann’s defense.

Regard­less, the most impres­sive part of this goal was that, despite the deflec­tion by McKenna, Klose kept his con­cen­tra­tion, adjusted his angle on the ball and fin­ished the goal. It’s too bad it didn’t stand on it’s merit alone.

2. The Mod­ern “M”

We call it at 4–3-3. It is closer to a 4–5-1. But the truth is that Daum has set out a mod­ern M (with­out the W) in his mid­field. It looks like this:

In our haste to define sys­tems in a slightly rigid way, it is inter­est­ing to note that Daum is doing some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent. And it is work­ing. It is easy to look at Petit and say he’s a DM, but he’s not play­ing that Makalele type role that we have come accus­tomed to defin­ing the posi­tion by. He plays higher up, break­ing up play before it can get to the deeper lying Brosin­ski and Pez­zoni. And play does flow through him, unlike a typ­i­cal holder. And with him obvi­ously capa­ble of track­ing back, the deeper mid­field­ers do have license to get for­ward. Brosin­ski was able to get for­ward and was piv­otal to both goals. I’ve seen Pez­zoni do the same, although today he was more com­mit­ted to defense.

3. Brosin­ski and Brecko on the right

First, you do not need to check their pock­ets for Franck Ribery. Few could com­pletely nul­lify the diminu­tive French­man. But the two of them had an objec­tive, which was to crowd Ribery’s space, and they did a spec­tac­u­lar job of it. Ribery was still a dan­ger, but Brecko shad­owed him the entire game on the wing and Brosin­ski cov­ered the chan­nel. Ribery was not the fac­tor we have come to expect as he wasn’t able to run at the defense and he was often forced into hur­ry­ing his passes. These two showed that tenac­ity is enough to limit Ribery’s impact and give any team a chance.

4. The Sweet Counter

A nice counter attack is a beau­ti­ful thing. Cologne’s first goal came of a fan­tas­tic one, led by their new sign­ing and Ribery agi­ta­tor, Daniel Brosin­ski. Podol­ski was stripped of the ball by Brosin­ski who then threads a pass to Vuci­ce­vic through three Bay­ern play­ers. Vuci­ce­vic plays two give-and-go’s with Petit in his own half and Novakovic in Bayern’s half that cov­ers and third of the pitch and sets him free in front of Bayern’s defense. Ehret mean­while ghosts in from the left. Oddo fails to fol­low and Dimiche­lis, who had a poor match, does noth­ing to stop the Frenchman’s run. Vuci­ce­vic threads a nifty pass into space and the angling Ehret gets to ball and slots it in to the far post for the first goal.

Cologne\‘s First Goal

5. Speak­ing of Ehret

Per­haps Klins­mann was try­ing to get the best out of Podol­ski by play­ing him against his former/future club. Rather than inspir­ing the Clown­prinz, what he did was inspire Fab­rice Ehret, who had a blind­ing game. He looks to occupy Podolski’s posi­tion in Daum’s mod­ern “M” and I don’t see Podol­ski being able to win the posi­tion as he doesn’t have Ehret’s tac­ti­cal acu­men. Ehret is a bet­ter player, at the moment, and Podol­ski could face an uphill bat­tle to unseat him. It seem he’s bound for a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion in Cologne to the one he faces in Munich. As the say­ing goes, “never go back”.

6. Like for Like

Klins­mann tactic’s are going to be heav­ily ana­lyzed as Bay­ern go into full scale cri­sis mode. How­ever, it’s jus­ti­fied to blame them. While he set out a sys­tem that should have worked, it wasn’t. And rather than chang­ing it, he only swapped pieces. Ribery was never moved to the cen­ter where he might have ben­e­fited from the change. He stuck to two strik­ers, when one or three might have caused McKenna and Geromel to change their sta­tions. And he stuck with a back four when it was obvi­ous that Cologne had set up shot to pro­tect the lead.

His sub­sti­tu­tions were all like for like with Dono­van com­ing in for Podol­ski, Alt­in­top for Schwe­in­steiger and Borowski for Ze Roberto. All three sub­sti­tu­tions were like for like, rather an attempt to change the dynam­ics. It was either arro­gance or stu­pid­ity and it did cost them the game. Not as much as the non-goal, but still.

7. Lucky

Due to the fan­tas­tic effort by the whole of the Cologne side, I find it rather hard to say that they were very lucky to win this game. While the goal-that-wasn’t isn’t their fault and they took advan­tage of the gift, I don’t think Daum was smart to set 10 behind the ball for 45 min­utes. He got away with it, but when you defend a lead (with no care to increase your lead) for an entire half against a decent side, let alone Bay­ern Munich, you have to con­sider your­self lucky to get the full 3 points. While Bay­ern did pull one back late, they had a dozen build ups that should have resulted in the lev­eler and win­ner. Geromel and Mon­dragon were on top form, but they rode their luck to the victory.

Tagged as: Christophe Daum, Daniel Brosinski, Fabrice Ehret, Jürgen Klinsmann, Kevin McKenna, Petit