Before the sun went down, everything was still going great for the Bayern fans who had traveled to Spain. In Valencia, grown men happily played on the carousel in front of the train station, in Villarreal they sat in small groups in front of the bars and drank Bavarian wheat beer. A wonderful, relaxed Champions League evening on the Mediterranean. A few hours later the sun was long gone and with it the carefree joy of the afternoon. Bayern suffered a surprise 1-0 defeat in the quarter-final first leg against Villarreal and now face an embarrassing early exit from the season’s most prestigious competition.
The fans were defiant after the final whistle. “Hooray! Hooray! Bayern, they’re here!” they sang as the home crowd trudged out of the Estadio de la Ceramica with big smiles. The visiting fans didn’t sound quite as convinced. No one should really be afraid of those Bavarians who were there on Wednesday evening. Because as surprising as the defeat was, it was also fully deserved. This wasn’t a raid victory, with the underdog defying the balance of power and the flow of the game. Villarreal were better in almost every area. And as Bayern admitted after the game, the end result was almost flattering for the record champions.
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“We also had one or two chances where we could score a goal, but that wouldn’t have been 100 percent deserved today because we just didn’t play well,” said coach Julian Nagelsmann after the game. On the Dazn microphone, Thomas Müller expressed it a little more clumsily: “If things went badly, it could have gone higher.” The fact that Villarreal left the pitch as a deserved winner was largely due to their coach Unai Emery, who was slowly becoming the Bete Noire der Bavaria will. In 2017, the Munich team lost against Emerys Paris Saint-Germain for the last time away in the Champions League. Five years later, their record streak of 25 away games without defeat came to an end – and again Emery was on the touchline.
On the other hand, Bayern also have a lot to blame themselves for. Against lively Spaniards they often seemed too slow, too clumsy. They were too hesitant at the front, too vulnerable at the back. The attacking difficulties could perhaps be forgiven. It’s nothing out of the ordinary for a well-organized team to effectively eliminate Bayern after an early goal, and Lewandowski, Müller and the rest sometimes have a bad day too. What should give Nagelsmann a little more headache was defensive performance, mainly because the problems are more familiar and deeper. Not for the first time this season, Bayern seemed extremely vulnerable in the transition moments. That was a problem in the first half. In the second, as the visitors pushed for an equaliser, the spaces behind them grew even bigger.
Wild second half
“The second half was totally wild because we really wanted to create chances. But eventually it became hara-kiri. We could easily have gotten two,” said Nagelsmann. As in the league against Bochum or in the cup against Borussia Mönchengladbach, there was again the feeling that Bayern can lose control on a bad day. There has always been a recovery from such slip-ups, and even now it would be too early to sound the alarm. Whether against Porto in 2015 or against Salzburg a few weeks ago: Bayern have been in a similar situation several times in the Champions League. For a “remontada”, as the Spaniards call it, they were almost always good in the second leg. With a view to the second leg in Munich next Tuesday, Nagelsmann promised “a different face”.
That will be necessary, because around midnight in Villarreal, Munich’s faces were rather depressed. As if in shock, the last guest fans wandered through the empty streets, looking in vain for any consolation. But there was no sign of that: all the bars had already closed.
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