If FC Bayern had won like that, it would have been Duselbayern again. At first it was the opposing goalkeeper who intervened to help, because after a rather delicate finish he was sure that he could catch the ball in front of the goal line – Pavao Pervan then held the ball firmly in his hands, but unfortunately they had it own self-confidence together with the ball moves behind the goal line. The visiting team led 1-0 thanks to a goal from wingman Jeremie Frimpong. Later, the visiting team combined nicely forward, over four or five stations, until full-back Alejandro Grimaldo, standing alone in the opposing penalty area, took a shot – but it was a somewhat unsuccessful shot, but from the visiting team’s point of view, it was deflected so fortunately that the ball just under the crossbar and therefore hitting the net unstoppably. The visiting team took a 2-1 lead, and this time the result would last until the end.
The visiting team, it has to be mentioned again at this point, was not FC Bayern. It was a club that had a similar name but, unlike the Munich team, was not necessarily known for its impressive winning tradition. On the contrary, Bayer Leverkusen has worked hard and deservedly earned the unflattering name suffix “Vizekusen” over the years. The Bayer Leverkusen of 2023 is different than its previous models.
Because the Werkself are not only acknowledged from all sides for playing such exciting and style-defining offensive football that sometimes even enthralls the feature pages. The 2023 version of Leverkusen is now also winning games like the one on Saturday in Wolfsburg, which could have turned out differently with a bit of bad luck. “We were prepared to experience a very tough game,” said Leverkusen coach Xabi Alonso, the mastermind of this stylistically incredibly flexible team. This was the only way this “super victory” was achieved.
Alonso thinks talking about the championship now is “not intelligent”
Shortly afterwards, he took special care when it came to an eagerly awaited topic: According to Alonso, he didn’t think talking about the championship title was “intelligent” at this point in time. Anyone who listened closely in the press room of the Wolfsburg Arena discovered a gap in the line of argument he had put up with great humility. Alonso did not feel the need to deny this championship its title potential. Why? Leverkusen had just won a close and competitive game at VfL Wolfsburg. And that was important for several reasons.
On the one hand, this was due to tangible facts, such as the fact that Wolfsburg was the best home team in the league before the match day and Leverkusen once again ended the match day as league leaders. The other level of importance goes into the depth of the game: Teams like Leverkusen, which have a creative standard and know how to implement it on the pitch, have to hold their own with regularity against teams whose primary goal is to force mistakes – and hardly any The team has mastered the art of constantly causing trouble, just like the Wolfsburg team trained by Niko Kovac.
VfL is at the forefront of a movement that, with a few exceptions, the entire league belongs to: In Germany, the main thing taught is robust, against-the-ball football, in which reacting comes before acting; its basic virtues are discipline and Intensity. These well-rehearsed pressing traps make it difficult for teams that want to play clean ball. The Leverkusen team, on the other hand, seems to be immune to it because they don’t do exactly what the league’s competition is passionate about: They don’t make any mistakes – and so they let all the attacks to win the ball come to nothing like the young Mohamed Ali, who is confident of winning over his opponents prances around and is rarely seriously caught by their blows.
You couldn’t “work Leverkusen over a whole game the way we did in the first half,” said Kovac, giving double praise: for Xabi Alonso’s team, which was always able to get out of pressure situations. But also for his Wolfsburg players, who at times managed to throw something significant into the spokes of the fluid Leverkusen wheels – in the form of a team performance that put the Werkself from the Lower Rhine under a level of stress that has rarely been seen this season.
Wolfsburg did a good job – but Leverkusen even have the necessary flair when they need it
Leverkusen’s victory, as Wolfsburg also admitted afterwards, was not undeserved in the end. But it also took a bit of so-called luck. VfL solved their tasks excellently, especially in the first half, because Kovac’s team repeatedly managed to shift the pressure in front of the Leverkusen goal without opening the floodgates for counterattacks at the back. However, Alonso’s team reacted as only real top teams can: they never let the stress get the better of them, but rather regained the self-confidence through dashing ball circulation that makes the difficult look easy – and through which, see above, they sometimes score goals , something that only FC Bayern, which is brimming with self-confidence, can achieve.
Frimpong and Grimaldo, the goal scorers, also play an important role in Alonso’s system, apart from (lucky) goals: one of them, Frimpong, turns from a right full-back when he has the ball to a wing attacker who creates verticality and, as a free radical, sets up the defensive chains Enemies busy. The other, Grimaldo, moves from left full-back to a builder in the center, increasing control there. As perfect as it sometimes looks as a collective, there was no way to hide the fact that Leverkusen also depend on individual players: it was the substitution of midfielder Florian Witz, who was initially rested after the international trip, that gave the game a new twist after the half-time break. A turn that Alonso attributed to the “hunger” of his players. And a twist that didn’t turn into the opposite shortly before the final whistle, when Wolfsburg striker Jonas Wind, standing alone, missed an opportunity to equalize 2-2.
In the past, Leverkusen would have conceded this goal.