To beat Bayern Munich in the Champions League playoffs, a team must first of all have two things: it must be talented and disciplined. RB Salzburg were neither on Tuesday and Bayern penalized the Austrians for a host of mistakes en route to a 7-1 (8-2 on aggregate) win that propelled the Germans into the tournament quarter-finals. .
There is always at least one pair in the 16th round that is completely one-sided. Manchester City’s 5-0 thrashing of Sporting CP in the first leg seemed to confirm the theory, and the Bayern-Salzburg match didn’t seem like one of those matches. Salzburg played Bayern very hard in the first leg at home and probably should have won; Kingsley Coman needed an equalizer in the 90th minute to bring Germany’s total to 1-1. However, you would not have guessed this by watching the second leg on Tuesday.
The team needs to work very hard not to give away goals to Bayern, especially in Munich, but Salzburg did just that, conceding two penalties in the first 21 minutes of the match. Robert Lewandowski is a great penalty shooter, so it’s no surprise that he buried both of them, sending Salzburg goalkeeper Philip Kohn the wrong way each time:
What’s more surprising is that those penalty fouls didn’t end up being Salzburg’s biggest mental farts. Just two minutes after Lewandowski’s second penalty, the Polish striker scored again. However, I find it difficult to give him credit for this; A failed header from Salzburg led to a perfect pass from Thomas Müller that broke the line and left Lewandowski behind a stupidly high defensive line, with the attacking Köhn unable to beat the Bavaria in time. One swing off the post later, and Lewandowski scored his fifth Champions League hat-trick, just nine minutes after his first goal that evening:
If the score didn’t end at 2-0, then it was definitely at 3-0 and Salzburg just broke from there. Eight minutes after this mess with a Lewandowski goal, Serge Gnabry found a place in the Austrian box to get the ball past left-back Andreas Ulmer and through the hands of Köhn, who had a first half that he won’t want to remember again.
One would think that a four-goal lead would result in a more relaxed second half for Bayern, but that’s not really who the team is. Instead, Bayern scored three more goals in the second 45 minutes: two against Müller and one against Leroy Sane. The best of all was probably this one from Muller in the 54th minute:
Salzburg gave hope to football fans who crave, nay, demand chaos with a stellar first leg at home, but any reasonable sports fan could and perhaps should have expected something like what happened on Tuesday. Bayern are too good, too smart and too deadly when they are given free rein to score a goal, and Salzburg, having made three critical mistakes in nine minutes, killed any hope. There is no shame in losing to Bayern, even badly, but it should never be that easy.