Thomas Müller didn’t like the first half against Mainz at all, so he only had one wish in the break. It came true in the second half – and Müller set a Bundesliga record.
“Mainz is a team that has certainly not been called disgusting to play against for nothing,” Thomas Müller said after his Bayern’s 2-1 win at the Sky microphone. “Disgusting” is a good description, because the Nullfünfer knew how to give Bayern little room to combine in half one through aggressive and disciplined defending – and thus paralysed the offensive play of the Munich team decisively.
Müller’s suspicions
“They have been preparing for us all week,” Müller speculated. “You can see that in such sequences in the defence, how quickly they react to our position changes. They were really well prepared for our castles and also very aggressive.” In their own offensive, Mainz chose the much easier approach than the Munich side and found the gaps there that Bayern had sought in vain in half one. Both set-piece man Jonathan Burkardt and goalscorer Karim Onisiwo had too much space when they scored the opening goal.
In the second half, however, the Munich team showed an improvement and twice made decisive inroads into the visitors’ defensive three-man defence – and thus turned the game around with goals from Kingsley Coman (53rd) and Jamal Musiala (74th). It was the reaction Müller had hoped for at half-time, as he revealed: “Of course you wish for that, but you don’t know if you’ll get it. “
The next record for a Bayern player
The victory was not only special because of the now almost certain autumn championship (six points ahead of BVB after their 1:1 in Bochum): For Müller it was the 291st in the Bundesliga for a single club. The 32-year-old thus equals Manfred Kaltz and can become the sole record holder with another win against Stuttgart on Tuesday (6.30 p.m.).
Then another Bayern player can also work on the next milestone: Robert Lewandowski, who went scoreless against Mainz, needs just two more goals to equal Gerd Müller’s record of 42 Bundesliga goals in a calendar year. The goal-scorer has two games left to do so.
