The Bavarians travelled to London and got a little taste of revenge against Chelsea winning the match 3-0 and doing as much as any team possibly can to lockdown a ticket to the next round in the first leg.
Before we get into how to match unfolded I'd like to highlight a curious stat.
With his two goals tonight, Serge Gnabry has upped his total in this year's Champions League to 5 6 goals and they all came in London. That's remarkable in an irrelevant way.
As the match reached halftime it was still scoreless but looking at what happened during the first 45 minutes it was clear that the Blues were in trouble. The absence of Pulisic and Hudson-Odoi really hurt the home side because in a match where Bayern dominated the ball, they needed more explosiveness on the counter. Olivier Giroud actually did a decent job holding the ball up but Mason Mount who got the majority of opportunities wasn't fast enough to do anything with it.
On the defensive side even with a more cautious approach than we are acostumed to seeing, Chelsea allowed way too many chances, where Bayen Munich had numeral superiority in dangerous areas. The biggest reason why the Germans didn't score earlier was that they simply got tough breaks. Muller hit the post once, Lewandowski almost got a couple of one on one opportunities with Caballero.
After the second half started, Bayern started capitalizing on their chances. Lewandowski showed why he is the world's best number 9 today. I guarantee the overwhelming majority of strikers wouldn't have passed the ball without looking on that first goal. After Bayern scoref Chelse as a team oind of broke down mentally and couldn't sustain the result conceding another goal in a couple of minutes later.
Alphonso Davies had a field day on the left side and Hans Flick should really be praised for that. Alongside the resurgence of Muller these were his two biggest contributions since taking over as the full-time manager.
Between Jorginho's yelllow card and Marcos Alonso's red one the Blues looked immature and that's quite simply unacceptable.
With so many absences this was probably the best time to face Chelsea for Bayern and they deserve credit for taking advantage of that.
Liverpool who I considered the favorite to win it all can still bounce back but the threat of elimination is real and beyond them there is no one undisputable team. Which leaves yhe path open and even if the Reds advance there is no reason to believe that Bayend Munich can't pull off a run and win the Champions League.
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I'll talk about Napoli x Barcelona tomorrow.
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