As Saturday afternoon morphed into evening, Bayern Munich showed themselves to be currently inhabiting their role as Big Bad Bayern, all but untouchable and provoked into their top gear by proper competition, as they were in the later game at rising Eintracht Frankfurt. This framed what had happened further north immediately before even more succinctly.
Even if Borussia Dortmund’s meeting with RB Leipzig had the statute of a defining match of the early part of the Bundesliga season, with second facing third, on the ground expectations were more modest in North Rhine-Westphalia. Whether it was Dortmund’s Niko Kovac quoting his fellow former Bayern manager Giovanni Trapattoni (“if you can’t win, you can’t lose,” he reflected at full time) or his opposite number Ole Werner talking of his “still developing” side, it felt as if a 1-1 draw was just, leaving both parties partially sated, partially frustrated.
