Vincent Kompany had warned after their completion of a record-pace Hinrunde of the Bundesliga season that Bayern would have to “start completely from scratch” for the campaign’s second half. The message clearly got across. Poor RB Leipzig could not have known that his players would interpret that quite so literally.
On Wednesday Bayern had done the job in Köln; on Saturday in Leipzig, they gave the full manifestation of their brilliance as the evening went on. This became the numbers of the season’s first half made flesh. It is difficult to know what their hosts could have done much differently. Leipzig had been “clearly the better team” in the first 45, as Kompany had admitted. “It felt like they were twice as good as us.” His opposite number, Ole Werner, described his team’s first half as “the almost perfect performance”, and it was difficult to argue. Had Antonio Nusa, part of the excellent collective movement that led to Rômulo’s opener, taken one of the two good chances he missed in that time, then perhaps the discussion would be different.
