With a thumping 7:1 victory, FC Bayern has made the quarter-finals of the Champions League clear. Reason enough for Thomas Müller to talk about a special “employee”.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Thomas Müller began his review of the Champions League second leg against RB Salzburg (7:1) on “Prime Video”, referring to the “Thomas Müller, you’re the best man” chants of the Bayern fans. It was a “decent game” in which Müller himself scored twice (5:0 and 6:1).
“Sometimes it’s easier when you’ve already played against an opponent. Then you have material, then you have experience. When you know: What else did I do wrong in the first leg? What does the opponent react to?”, Müller revealed. And yet the record champions almost fell behind early on – as they did in the first leg. But Kingsley Coman was just able to deflect Nicolas Capaldo’s shot for a corner (3.).
But this time one thing was different: “We also have this luck of the game today, which we didn’t have at all in Salzburg.” After Coman’s act, Maximilian Wöber could only stop his opponent Robert Lewandowski twice in the penalty area with a foul, and so the FCB was on course early this time – and really turned up the heat afterwards.
According to Müller, everyone was aware of the importance of the game, because “if we are eliminated here, then we have a very sad three months ahead of us. Then one or the other stone would have been turned over from outside and inside, and rightly so, of course.” Munich’s claim is rather to play “every game perfectly”, even if Müller of course knows that this “does not reflect reality”.
The brief disorder after the many changes caused a blemish, which Salzburg promptly used to score the consolation goal through Maurits Kjaergaard to make it 1:5 in the meantime. After that, however, the Bavarians tightened the reins again and increased the score with strong combinations.
The “criticism caretaker “
In Müller’s opinion, he and his teammates – despite all their tendency towards perfectionism – have to be careful “that we don’t pull ourselves down too much” – or in other words: “We have to be careful sometimes that we don’t let the criticism caretaker into the dressing room too much.”
Who that might be, Müller did not reveal, but the “criticism caretaker” is unlikely to spend too much time in the Bayern dressing room this week after his 20th Champions League quarter-final.
