Sport director Hasan Salihamidzic sharply criticized the team after the 2-1 defeat at Bayer Leverkusen. An eaten Thomas Müller criticized the performance shown in clear words, while coach Julian Nagelsmann was at a loss given his team’s poor performance.
“That wasn’t what Bayern Munich means. We missed everything, let ourselves be overrun by a team that was still playing on Thursday,” said an angry Salihamidzic after the defeat against the Werkself, who were still in the Bundesliga on Thursday Europa League played in Budapest.
And further: “I have rarely experienced so little drive, so little mentality, so little duel, so little assertiveness.”
Müller took a similar line. “Leverkusen did it very well, they were very toxic and very uncomfortable especially against the ball,” he explained after the final whistle DAZN. “Unfortunately, we played very little of what made us strong in the last few games and lost a lot of balls very quickly.” His conclusion: “Looking at the game as a whole, the defeat today is unfortunately deserved.”
The team must now “ask themselves a few questions” before the upcoming league summit against Borussia Dortmund in two weeks, emphasized Müller: “We imagined the starting position to be different, that’s logical.”
Nagelsmann analyzed DAZN, his team was “the worse team except for the last 10 minutes”. “In the first half we did a lot on our own. A lot of pressing, a lot of freeing by ourselves. There was somehow little power on the field for us.” He also explained that Bayern “deserved to lose”.
FC Bayern: Julian Nagelsmann warns of the BVB game
The 35-year-old couldn’t explain why his team was so weak: “We’ve had that again and again. In the last few weeks we’ve made good steps forward in that regard. This pairing of emotion and quality. Today we were kind of sluggish overall.”
One issue for him: Bayern’s weak duel quota on the offensive: “We have a few players with a zero percent quota, then it’s always difficult, away anyway.” The “own game presentation” was also “very weak”: “We hardly had phases in which we had three or four passes in a row.”
The Bayern coach switched quickly after the initial five-man chain, but “it took forever for us to really get into the structure. At some point we defended far too deeply for the switch to man-to-man. Overall, we were just not there today good.”
Nagelsmann said of the BVB game after the international break on April 1: “We definitely have to win, otherwise it will be difficult to win the championship.”
