Bayern and Manchester United suffered painful defeats
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The main events of this week in European football were the simultaneous collapse of two football giants – German and English. Bayern was knocked out of the German Cup in the second round, having managed to lose away to the representative of the third division, Saarbrücken, and Manchester United, which a few days ago lost 0:3 in the championship to Manchester City, in the 1/8 finals of the Cup of the English League was defeated with the same score by Newcastle.
German Cup
After Bayern’s defeat to Saarbrücken, all German media resources, of course, tried to assess the degree of sensationalism. Cup tournaments are always full of interesting results, and the Munich team know from their own experience that they can slip up at any time: this was their third exit in the second round in a four-year term. But still, there was something special about this one. Saarbrücken is a team from the third-ranked German division, and Bayern have not lost to clubs outside the top two for more than a quarter of a century.
And even earlier – almost half a century ago, in 1977 – a match took place, which various German publications always remembered when commenting on the cup emergency. Perhaps the best match in the modest history of Saarbrücken in terms of achievements. Then he managed to demolish peak Bayern with Franz Beckenbauer and Gerd Müller with a score of 6:1. And here is a new anomaly.
However, Bayern and its coach Thomas Tuchel had quite good excuses at hand. A bunch of leaders were not included in the Munich starting line-up – Harry Kane, Jamal Musiala, Kingsley Coman, Leon Goretzka. Tuchel gave some people a rest before the most important match in the championship against Borussia Dortmund, others were injured. And at the very beginning of the game, Matheis de Ligt, Bayern’s key central defender, injured his knee, whose loss, of course, could not help but be felt. Finally, she had to fight with Saarbrücken on, to put it mildly, a specific lawn. Even on the eve of the match, few doubted that it would be cancelled: heavy rain turned the field into a real swamp. But the dehumidification system worked, and the game was still played. True, it was still terribly difficult to stay on your feet on the slippery surface, as was, for example, passing accurately. In general, Bayern lost some of its trump cards.
Meanwhile, Saarbrücken showed amazing tenacity. His players confidently went into single combat, often took the ball away from their opponents and often ran into counterattacks. They did not pay attention to the early missed goal and, at the end of the first half, waited for the Munich team to make a mistake, restoring the balance, and already in stoppage time, Marcel Gaus brought them victory.
English League Cup
Manchester United lost the second match in a row at home with a score of 0:3. And this was also a reason to rummage through the archives. It turns out that the club hasn’t had such a series since 1962. But the main thing is that it fit well into a sad trend for Manchester residents.
They looked extremely promising last season as a team poised for a big breakthrough. In the current one, they still look like a team ready to fall into the abyss. Manchester United now have eight losses in 15 official matches this season. In the championship, he lags behind the top ten, and his play constantly provokes criticism with its unreliability and inertia. In the meeting with Newcastle, a participant in the Champions League, Manchester United was no better than last weekend, when it was beaten by the English flagship Manchester City. The numbers tell a good story about how natural his failure was in the third most important domestic tournament – for example, the number of shots on target at Newcastle. The Manchester team only had two of them. There were about the same number of really serious chances to excel.
It is not surprising that after the match, both the Daily Mail, The Guardian and the BBC talked about the stability of the club’s coach Erik ten Hag, agreeing that the chair under him was wobbly. And well-known experts did not hold back when describing how the situation in the team looked from the outside. For example, Shay Given, the former Newcastle and Ireland goalkeeper, said that the “gap” between the players and the coaching staff was simply painful. Ten Hag himself, however, tried to cheer up and explained that he saw in today’s fall a “challenge” that he must accept in order to fix everything.
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