Dino Toppmöller already had an inkling: With his free-kick goal at Benfica, Leroy Sané underlined his top form – and showed what benefits even the best.
Suddenly Manuel Neuer was in the middle of Benfica Lisbon’s half. Leroy Sané was preparing for his free-kick on Wednesday evening when his captain indicated something and then disappeared again towards the halfway line. “Next level sweeper keeper!”, Bayern tweeted, meaning that the next level of goalkeeper had been reached.
But unlike some others, this moment in Lisbon did not belong to the goalkeeper, whose excursion was possibly connected to the previous foul on Robert Lewandowski, but ultimately remained a mystery. No, this moment belonged to Sané.
With a lot of cut and his left foot, Bayern’s number 10 converted the free kick to make it 1:0, the Munich “can opener”, as substitute coach Dino Toppmöller put it after the 4:0 victory. That it was Sané who got the can open was no coincidence; neither was how he did it.
Sané takes on new role “outstandingly “
With an outstanding performance (kicker grade 1), the national player, who was booed a few weeks ago, underlined his brilliant form. Together with national coach Hansi Flick, Bayern coach Julian Nagelsmann seems to have succeeded in defining a role for Sané in which he feels extremely comfortable.
“In the last few games, Leroy has been playing very often in the half-area and no longer on the wing,” explained Toppmöller. “He is doing an outstanding job because he is a very good footballer. He always had good actions, had a super positional game.” He put his stamp on the Bayern offence in Lisbon.
And the free kick? “He shoots it in sensationally, of course,” said Toppmöller, who had already guessed that after Sané had shot a stationary ball a metre over the goal from what was actually an even better position in the 22nd minute. “I said on the bench: ‘Well, yesterday he put every other one in, so it should go in now.'”
“I’ve been practising these free kicks since I’ve been in Manchester “
Sané’s “free kick trick” is in fact a very mundane one: he practices. “I practice a relatively large number of free kicks,” he said on Wednesday, and when you compare that statement to ones from 2018 and 2019, it’s clear what that means. “I’ve been practising these free kicks since I’ve been in Manchester,” he had said then, when he had once netted two for ManCity in the Champions League against Hoffenheim and at Schalke, even evoking Cristiano Ronaldo comparisons. He moved to England in 2016.
And in Bayern training, too, “he always takes the wall and then shoots ten, 20 free kicks at the box,” Toppmöller reported. “It’s nice to see that paying off.” Practice also helps the best. In Lisbon, Sané scored his second direct free-kick goal of the season – in six competitive games in total.
