[ad_1]
Bayern Munich and Lyon will play the semi-finals of the UEFA Champions League in Lisbon on Wednesday. The winner will face Paris Saint-Germain on Sunday in the final of the competition, the richest club championship in Europe.
TV: Wednesday’s game airs in the United States on the CBS All Access streaming service, and in Spanish on Univision.
18 ‘
Gnabry gives Bayern a 1-0 lead!
It looked a lot easier than it was. Gnabry registers a long, effortless loop pass over the good win and, sensing the space inside, bursts into it. A few touches give him an opening, and just as the ball rolls over the top of the penalty area, he snatches a left-footed shot that screams past Lopes. Great goal, and Bayern leads, 1-0.
It shows how quickly Bayern can burn you; that was less than a minute after a ball jumped off Neuer’s post, and a long ball meant for them to recover.
Instead, Gnabry scores a rocket between five defenders. Sensational.
17 ‘
Camp off the post!
First, he shot Alphonso Davies at the signing. Then, bringing the ball back to his left foot, but his torn shot hits the post and flips it right back at him. Wonderful game.
11 ‘
Now it’s Bayern’s turn. Goretzka missed closely.
A wonderful touch from Lewandowski, the Bayern target man, allows Goretzka to sneak behind on the right. But he breathes his shot, barely touching the ball, and rolls safely on goal.
Harmlessly, that is, until Lopes realizes that he could just squeeze inside the left post and dive down to push him into a corner.
6 ft
Memphis breaks in alone! But his shot is wide.
A big mistake from Bayern – the nuances of Barcelona – as a ball coming in from midfield splits the center-backs and pushes Memphis Depay straight to the middle, coming out of the center circle. But Depay takes too many touches to try to get around the enormous Neuer and sends his shot falling into the right net.
Huge early luck there.
3 ‘
Bayern are already expanding the field.
The gaps suit the Bundesliga champions, and so they immediately tried to stretch Lyon wide and side-to-side in the opening minutes. But Rudi Garcia is not a fool, and Lyon does not fall for that. It is quite possible that they have seen the Barcelona strip and know what is going on if you do.
Rory Smith’s semi-final preview: rested against rusty?
It has only been a few months since Jean-Michel Aulas declared that all of this would be quite impossible. French football authorities had declared the end of the Ligue 1 season – with 10 more games to play – in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, and Aulas, the owner and president of Olympique Lyonnais, was simmering.
Not only would the cancellation cost French clubs revenue, time and players, Aulas said, not only would it deprive her team of the opportunity to improve their position – they were seventh in the table when the season was shut down , meaning she has faced the prospect of a first season out of European competition in more than a decade – but that would dampen the two French representatives’ attempts in the Champions League.
Aulas’ theory was simple, and it was widely held: Lyon and Paris Saint-Germain, the two French teams still alive in the round of 16, would return to the Champions League cold, weakened by ring rust, against opponents in full color of the season. “In August, we are going to meet teams in these competitions which have been able to prepare better than us,” he declared in the spring.
On Tuesday night, PSG became the first France team to reach a Champions League final since Monaco in 2004. On Wednesday, Lyon can join their big rival, although there is the rather intimidating bulwark of Bayern Munich – fresh out of an 8-2 win against Barcelona – standing on the way. Never a man to let facts get in the way of his opinion, Aulas suggested, after PSG rallied to eliminate Atalanta and Lyon shocked Manchester City in the quarter-finals, that “a little bit of luck»Had erased the competitive disadvantage that the French teams had suffered.
Lyon will need it to hold out tonight. Bayern have looked imperious since European football resumed – since Hansi Flick took the helm in November, in fact – culminating in this bloody demolition of Barcelona. The general rule of European football is that the team with the most resources and the best players will win, and in that sense, it is as big a gap as PSG’s victory over RB Leipzig on Tuesday.
Lyon are at least an outsider easier to acclaim than Leipzig. While the pugnacious Aulas is not what you might call universally beloved in France, he has made his club sort of a role model for others to follow. And he did it not once, but twice. First, at the turn of the century, when intelligent recruiting, especially from South America, made Lyon the leader in French football. And now, when its productive academy and focus on youth has earned it a reputation as one of Europe’s premier talent factories.
Houssem Aouar and Maxence Caqueret are the two crown jewels; both will have to use this game when their star bursts, when they announce themselves to the world, if Lyon is to have a chance.
The queues are over.
The Bayern team are, as usual, formidable:
Neuer manual; Joshua Kimmich, Jérôme Boateng, David Alaba, Alphonso Davies; Thiago Alcantra, Léon Goretzka, Ivan Perisic, Thomas Müller, Serge Gnabry; Robert Lewandowski.
It’s the same starting lineup that hit Chelsea (4-1) and Barcelona (8-2) to get here.
Lyon, too, are sticking to what has worked in the past, which means Moussa Dembélé, the man of the match in the quarter-final win over Manchester City, starts off on the bench.
Lyon’s programming:
Anthony Lopes; Leo Dubois, Marcelo, Jason Denayer, Marçal; Houssem Aouar, Maxence Caqueret, Bruno Guimaraes, Maxwel Cornet, Memphis Depay, Karl Toko Ekambi.
Today’s arbiter is Antonio Mateu Lahoz. He has a reputation for being a talkative referee.
Look at the wings.
With Lyon in a 3-5-2 formation, with wings ready to pull back or push forward, and Bayern in their usual 4-2-3-1, there should be some action – and some opportunities – outside today. .
Bayern’s Davies and Kimmich, for example, can be devastating when they go for the attack, which they should do generously. However, it could create chances of a counterattack for Lyon if they get caught.
Of course, if they step forward and do what they did against Barcelona – create goals or score them in clusters – then getting on the counter may be the last thing on Lyon’s mind. This Davies run alone, to install Kimmich against Barcelona, was enough to keep the defenders awake.
That said, Bayern’s high back line – a hallmark of his forefoot approach – has seen him catch up early on a few times against Barcelona. He was lucky not to burn himself, and the rout soon began, but Manchester City scored the first against Manchester City taking advantage of a similar chance. So he knows as well as any team that an opponent’s aggressive nature can be turned against him.
A good pre-game read on Hansi Flick from Bayern.
Lyon’s Houssem Aouar has been here before. As a boy.
Aouar, the promising 22-year-old midfielder from Lyon, grew up at the club. He joined Lyon as an 11-year-old amateur in 2009 and has grown over the years to become one of the club’s top talents since he started at 18 in 2017.
He wears the No.8 shirt, which was presented to him when his former carrier, Corentin Tolisso, joined Bayern Munich three years ago. But that, he noted on social media this morning, is not his only Bayern-Lyon connection.
Ten years ago, at 12, Aouar wrote on his social media accounts, he was one of the young players selected to carry one of the banners on the pitch when Lyon hosted their only Ligue des semi-final. champions.
Bayern Munich won that day, on a hat trick (left foot, right foot, header) from Ivica Olic, and qualified for the final, where they lost to José Mourinho’s Inter Milan . Aouar now has a chance to write a different story.
Bayern have a championship pedigree. But Lyon also has a proud history.
Bayern Munich continue their sixth European title this week, and their first since 2013, when Robert Lewandowski was a defeated Dortmund striker in the final at Wembley. He has just won his eighth consecutive Bundesliga title, he has young (Joshua Kimmich, Alphonso Davies) and old (Thomas Müller, Lewandowski, Manuel Neuer) stars, not to mention a roster filled with reliable role players and doers. difference in reserve. And he’s won 31 of his 34 games since Hansi Flick took over in November. This is, in almost every way, what a Champions League title contender should look like.
But Lyon is not left out. Seven-time champion of France, he was a regular in the Champions League for a decade in the early years of the century, and he even reached the semi-finals in 2010, when he was inaugurated by surprise! – Bayern Munich. And while Lyon were both opportunistic and lucky to beat Manchester City in the quarter-finals on Saturday, they have transformed into a strong defensive and offensively dangerous side under Rudi Garcia. And now it’s rolling, his early-season struggles and fights with his own long-forgotten fans. Having already beaten Cristiano Ronaldo and Juventus, he did not curl up in front of Bayern. Or at least it shouldn’t.
And after?
Wednesday’s winner will face Paris Saint-Germain, who outclassed RB Leipzig in Tuesday’s first semi-final, in Sunday’s final at Estádio da Luz in Benfica.
The game will be PSG’s first appearance in the final and the culmination of a multi-year project by its Qatari owners to build a world-class squad. It didn’t always go well for PSG But as Rory wrote on Tuesday night:
After all the wrong turns, all the heartache and disappointment, the humiliations and twists and turns and heartbreaking collapses, Paris Saint-Germain has finally done what it was designed and built to be.
This year marked PSG’s first semi-final appearance since 1995 – long before the club’s Qatari owners arrived and even the birth of Kylian Mbappé – and the club have, in recent years, grown in the habit of not face one of the European giants. But he has everything he needs to compete this time around: the world’s most expensive player in Neymar, arguably his best young player in Mbappé, and the courage, motivation and luck that have been lacking in past races.
Sunday, against an opponent rich in tradition, will be the final test of a draft that has been years in the scoring.
[ad_2]
Source link