Andre Schubert waited, an awkward smile on his face, as Pep Guardiola, looking off into the distance, strolled right by him.
Schubert, the Borussia Monchengladbach manager, offered his hand to the Bayern Munich boss ahead of Saturday’s Bundesliga match—one in which Bayern, with a win, would have secured a fourth straight league title and third of Guardiola’s three-year tenure.
They drew 1-1—Andre Hahn’s 72nd-minute strike cancelling out Thomas Muller’s sixth-minute opener—and the champagne was left on ice for at least another week.
But what was Guardiola looking at? How did a man who fails to notice much of anything look past his Allianz-Arena guest? Granted, any speculation as to his thoughts is more poetic licence than serious deduction, but look at his face—at the worry in his expression, at the gaze fixed somewhere outside the present.
Would it be too much to suggest that Atletico Madrid—Bayern’s Champions League semifinal opponent, who holds a 1-0 aggregate lead ahead of Tuesday’s second leg—has got inside his head?
Maybe. And maybe not.
That Guardiola omitted Muller at Estadio Vicente Calderon in the first leg last week would seem to suggest an unnecessary overthink.
Muller, it’s worth pointing out, is Bayern’s joint-top scorer in the Champions League and has notched 32 goals in all competitions this season. There are few footballers with comparable pedigree, at both club and international levels, and, incredibly, he’s still getting better.
“I wanted a left-footed left winger and a right-footed right-winger, and an extra midfielder,” Guardiola explained after Bayern’s first-leg loss. In other words, he opted for Kingsley Coman and Douglas Costa, with Xabi Alonso joining Arturo Vidal and Thiago Alcantara in the centre of the park.
By contrast, when Bayern overcame a two-nil deficit at home to Juventus in the second leg of the Round of 16, it was Muller working off centre-forward Robert Lewandowski; it was Muller scoring the stoppage-time equalizer; it was Muller assisting Thiago’s winner.
“Maybe it would have been better to play him, but I had to make a decision and it was nothing against him—just tactics,” he said.
“Just tactics,” by the way, is code for either, “He’s out of favour,” or, “I’m really overthinking this.”
In Muller’s case, it’s obviously the latter. And that he started against Monchengladbach would seem to suggest he’ll be on the sidelines when the first ball is kicked on Tuesday.
“Everyone has killed me, but I’m still alive,” remarked Guardiola, addressing the criticism that has come his way the last week. “We have another game left, and if we lose it, then you can kill me. But we still have a chance.”
History as recent as the Juventus turn-around indicates it’s actually quite a decent chance, but one quite clearly affected by the degree to which Atletico has burrowed into Bayern’s head.
Even Philipp Lahm, the Bayern captain and his country’s most-capped Champions League player in competition history, admitted he and his teammates were overly cautious in the Spanish capital.
“We tried not to take too many risks at the beginning, which is why we played more long balls than we usually do,” he said. “We were aware of how strong Atletico is.”
Awareness, however, is rather different, never mind more helpful, than paranoia, and it was with paranoia, with fear, that Guardiola set up his team and designed his instructions ahead of the first leg. Predictably (When has Bayern, or any Guardiola team, set out to intentionally play long balls?), the approach backfired.
So has he learned his lesson ahead of the re-match?
Don’t count on it.
The 1-0 deficit means he’ll likely be just as cautious at Allianz-Arena, and, he’ll tell himself, he can deploy Muller from the bench. By which time, of course, it may well be too late.
But he has another conundrum as well.
Attacker Franck Ribery has declared himself fit to start against Atletico, and given that Guardiola played him from the beginning in both quarterfinal legs as well as the Juventus victory it’s likely his pronouncement will get serious consideration.
Whether Guardiola is thinking clearly enough to make the appropriate decision is another matter entirely—the matter in question.
Atletico—fierce, relentless, intimidating—has got to him, has got inside his head. At this point, any choice he makes is impaired by that paranoia, that fear, that worry drawn across his face as strolls past Andre Schubert.
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