The post-Champions League debate is well underway and it's not about which Madrid team will win the trophy - the Athletic ones or the Real ones. It's actually about whether a losing manager in the semi-finals was a failure.
The prevailing sentiment is that hey, so Guardiola didn't win a Champions League at Bayern, he was great anyway. Not only that, Bayern fans love the guy too. And besides, he took time to immerse himself in the Bavarian culture and even learned German before a ball was kicked! You know how hard it is to learn a foreign language?
So the consensus is that the Guardiola years were memorable and not a failure. We here at the IMOTGP blog don't consider him a failure but memorable? Meh.
We don't want to frown on three Bundesliga titles but it would be very hard for Bayern not to win them. For one, the league stinks outside of Bayern and Dortmund. Yes, Gladbach and Leverkusen are decent sides but their Champions League performances show they were not too formidable. Last season's runner-up, Wolfsburg, sold their best player, Schalke couldn't get out of their own way and these losers who wear blue actually held third spot for much of this season before forgetting how to play football once April started, turning instead into April fools.
Pep won one German Cup title two years ago that was slightly disputed and crashed out last year in the semi-finals at home, with your faithful blogger in attendance. There is still an up-for-grabs German Cup final versus Dortmund set for this May.
In the Champions League, Pep won at Arsenal in his first knockout away match then proceeded to never win one again for the duration of his Bayern tenure. That included three defeats each of the last three years in Spain in the semi-finals, an embarrassing defeat in Porto, a blown two-goal lead at Juventus, and an uninspiring draw at Benfica. He couldn't even beat David Moyes' Man United away and Bayern were behind in that tie in the second leg!
Let's talk the matches that mattered - the semi-finals in a row against Real, Barcelona and Atletico. For all of Pep's attacking reputation, Bayern never produced an away goal. The capitulation at home vs. Real ranks as one of the club's worst European matches. His side displayed a naivete in the first leg at Barca to allow two late strikes.
We submit that Bayern were the better side over Atletico over 180 minutes, but he inexplicably left Muller out of his XI in the first leg and it was Simeone's team that reacted better in the immediate aftermath of the halftime break in leg two. Also if you say that Bayern were better than Atletico, it must be said that they were probably outplayed over the first 180 minutes of their round of 16 tie against Juve as they escaped by the skin of their teeth.
Also, did any player really individually reach the heavens for him like Franck Ribery did for Jupp Heynckes in 2012-13 when he could have and maybe should have captured a Ballon D'Or? Maybe only Robert Lewandowski and his magical five-goal haul came merely against Wolfsburg in a mid-week home match. Yes, Xabi Alonso became integral in the midfield but it hardly made him must-see-TV. It's clear that all that Messi magic was down to the man himself as well as Xavi and Andres Iniesta.
Pep will celebrate a third Bundesliga title this weekend - and if he doesn't, things will have gone horribly wrong. It's not fair to say things went horribly wrong for him at Bayern. But these teams won't be remembered at all and if they will, it will be for the way they joylessly throttled a bunch of Bundesliga also-rans. His tenure also overlaps with a German World Cup-winning team that wasn't amazing either, but at least will go down in football history for a 7-1 shellacking of the host nation in the semi-finals.
Pep's Bayern teams? Meh.
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