This Saturday, 22nd May, Bayern Munich will be playing in the Champions League final against Inter Milan. Yes, you read right: on a Saturday! It’s unusual, what with Wednesday tending to be the day for European football – but the marketing whizzes from UEFA will no doubt have noticed that Saturday is far better for viewing figures. And we all know that bad TV ratings are a sure way to destroy a good competition.
This is the first time Bayern have been in the final since 2001; overall, Munich’s biggest team has won this cup – and its predecessor the European Cup – four times and made it to the final another three. Meanwhile Inter Milan have been waiting for another win in the cup after their double-triumph in 1964 and 1965; they were last in the final way back in 1972. This makes Bayern of course the favourites on paper, but if you take a look at the teams both sides will be fielding and the way they have played up until now, though, the chances are an even split.
There’s no other Italian team with such strong connections to Munich as Inter Milan. For example the current chairman of the board, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, who was a striker for the boys in black and blue back in the 80s. At the beginning of the 90s, it was the Ex-Bayern men Andreas Brehme and Lothar Matthäus along with Jürgen Klinsmann, who would later play for and coach Munich, who defined Inter Milan. Then there was Giovanni Trapattoni, an Inter man through-and-through, who came to Munich and became a cult figure due to his mangling of the German language. Most recently, Bayern lost a defender – Lucio – to Milan.
And it’s not just the teams; the current coaches – Louis van Gaal at Bayern and José Mourinho at Milan – have a shared history. Mourinho was an assistant to van Gaal during his Barcelona days between 1997 and 2000.
Mourinho is currently fielding an Inter team that is, in terms of style, very much like that of Helenio Herrera’s Milan back in the 60s. This way of playing brought the favourites Barcelona to their knees in the semi-final, and yet this very Italian way of playing defensive football is being done without Italians: the main team is composed essentially of Argentinians, Brazilians and Columbians, with Italians on the sub-bench if anywhere at all (like Marco Materazzi, the guy who got headbutted by Zidane in the 2006 World Cup final). Meanwhile Bayern are playing a rather more attack-focussed game from the flanks, which took them to victory against favourites Man-U; nevertheless, the Munich team will have to do without their playmaker Franck Ribéry due to his match ban.
Meanwhile, the heart of the Inter team is the Dutchman Wesley Sneijder; he too could be absent from play due to an injury on to his thigh. If he does play, he’ll be up against fellow Dutchmen like Marc van Bommel, Arjen Robben and Louis van Gaal. An interesting little detail is that Robben and Sneijder were both sifted out of the Real Madrid team before this last season. The bitter irony of them meeting in Madrid in the final that Real really wanted to be playing in can’t have escaped their former employers’ notice.
There a few other points where Bayern and Inter have something in common: both, for example, would have a trio of titles if they won this game, with both teams having won their home leagues and cups. Well, what do I mean by “home”? The German teams full of Dutch guys and the Italian side doesn’t have a single Italian! That’s modern football for you.
(Stefan Reichart/Brian Melican)
