Tuesday, May 12, 2015
The teams!
The team sheets have been handed in, and they look like this:
Bayern Munich: Neuer; Rafinha, Benatia, Boateng, Bernat; Lahm, Schweinsteiger, Xabi Alonso, Thiago; Müller, Lewandowski.
Barcelona: Ter Stegen; Daniel Alves, Piqué, Mascherano, Jordi Alba; Rakitic, Busquets, Iniesta; Messi, Suárez, Neymar.
Referee: England’s own Mark Clattenburg and his assistants, Simon Beck and Jake Collin, and his additional assistants, Anthony Taylor and Andre Marriner.
So, Barcelona coming to town, three-goal deficit to overcome. Bayern, full of bullish pre-match noises, are going to go for this. There’s basically no way the next couple of hours aren’t going to be fascinating, even if it’s hard to see the Bavarians getting back into it. Perhaps some music might inspire them …
The best song ever written about comebacks
From which we can conclude that there haven’t been enough good songs written about comebacks. Anyway, this reached No20 in 1984. The haircuts are fabulous, and it’s a fine, soaring melody, surely ripe for a modern smash-hit cover version, with better production and less early-80s nonsense.
The worst song ever written about comebacks
Surely there’s no debating this one. The fine, tasteful, upstanding residents of the United Kingdom made this a No14 smash in 1961. Charlie Drake didn’t even have the excuse of being Australian – the man was as English as Pearly Queens and Coronation chicken.
Bayern Munich’s season may be listing ominously, with Germany’s champions required to overturn a three-goal deficit to the divine attacking talents of Barcelona in their Champions League semi-final second leg. But if the ship does go down at the Allianz Arena on Tuesday night, it will do so with the very public assurance thatPep Guardiola intends to remain at the club for another year.
As denials go this was at the more robust end of the scale. “I have said it 200 million times,” Guardiola told the media in Munich and beyond at his pre-match press conference. “I have one more year on my contract here. Next season I will be here and that’s all there is to it.”
But is it? For all Guardiola’s certainty a bizarre phony war of denial and counter-denial is currently sputtering away at one remove, with some reports going so far as to claim Bayern’s manager has signed a preliminary agreement to move to Manchester City this summer, since denied by Pep-friendly sources closer to home.
As ever in football it seems likely some truth lies on both sides, the rest in the grey areas between. Few things are ever entirely certain in an industry that is uniquely vulnerable to what Harold Wilson described as “events”. Certainly it is hard to shake the feeling that another pride-puncturing defeat at the Allianz Arena to go with last season’s steamrollering by Real Madrid and the cuffing aside at the Camp Nou might add up to something more toxic than just another near miss in Europe.
