Midfield? Who needs a midfield anyway? In fact who needs the ball at all?
For 66 minutes at Old Trafford it looked as though David Moyes might just have produced one of the more defiantly retro tactical triumphs of recent years.
On a night that began slowly but built to a second-half barrage of rolling noise around Old Trafford, Manchester United produced for an hour an intriguingly old-school performance of condensed, fast-breaking, midfield-bypassing football, the kind of football that might have come served up drizzled with horseradish and, spritzed with gravy and labelled modern British with a twist. All this against Europe’s most state-of-the-art possession football fetishists.
United will travel to Munich for the second leg still distinct second favourites as Bastian Schweinsteiger’s brilliantly-worked equaliser cancelled out United’s opening goal, a sublime, leaping twisting header by Nemanja Vidic from a corner. But there was credit for Moyes here in a tight but still oddly lopsided match, a meeting of pass and move and hit and run, that will leave United with some hope in Bavaria.
As Bayern kicked off and immediately set about passing the ball among themselves it was already clear how this was likely to play itself out as from the start. United adopted a kind of guerilla-football approach, giving the opposition what he is all geared up to take – territory, possession – in order to strike from behind the lines of staged retreat.
This tie was always going to be about what United might attempt do about Bayern’s overwhelming, almost obsessional strength in midfield in the Jupp-Pep era, a process only accelerated by the arrival of a manager who last summer announced “I love midfielders”, and whose teams are testament to this, one of football’s great if rather schmaltzy modern love affairs.
Guardiola will never cede the ground here. He is the master of one-upmanship: you pick five in midfield, he’ll pick six. This is a man whose midfields have midfields, lines between the lines, midfields within midfields. And this is the challenge Bayern posed at Old Trafford, a team so adept in their passing and so well-drilled in their pressing of space that at times playing them must feel a bit like being jostled to death on a tennis court by at least 20 scurrying, little, world-class, midfield generals.
How to combat this is exactly the kind of high-stakes tactical riddle many have assumed to be beyond Moyes. He had a plan here. A simple plan but it worked. For a while, before its basic limitations, the almost complete concession of possession of the football, began to nag at the edges.
Guardiola picked seven midfielders in all here – one of them Javi Martinez in defence, another a converted full-back. Moyes replied by allowing his condensed midfield five to simply back off.
Extra man
With Rooney the extra man when Bayern had the ball (unless stated otherwise, Bayern always had the ball) this left Danny Welbeck a lone but significant central striker in what was in effect a fancy game of kick and rush.
Ryan Giggs played his first diagonal pass over the top for Welbeck in the opening minute, and Welbeck even had the ball in the net moments later, but was ruled out for dangerous play.
Steadily the Bayern midfield began to thrum through the high gears, as Philipp Lahm, Schweinsteiger and Toni Kroos manipulated the ball between them with the usual startling, upright muscular deftness. But still Moyes’s tactics of deep, sharp-tackling resistance combined with pace on the break created a kind of managed stasis in the opening 20 minutes. Was it really football? Or more accurately, was it really United football?
For all the defiant talk United were content to play not just like an away team here, but like an away team who have already had a man sent off. And for a while, as Bayern took 80 per cent possession of the ball in the opening quarter, this all felt at times a little too cowed and dutiful for the club of footballing dreams.
And yet, it did cause problems. United began to strike from behind their guard, their earliest concerted attacks coming when Fellaini stationed himself briefly in that Everton-style bruiser-trequartista position, shielding and nudging and holding up the ball while Jerome Boateng – unconvincing here – flailed at his back. At the same time Bayern’s condensing of the play looked bizarrely high-risk when Welbeck so obviously has the beating of both central defenders for speed.
With half-time approaching United had the clearest chance of the half, Welbeck running on to Rooney’s through pass while Boateng flailed, but finding Manuel Neuer equal to his attempted dink. And five minutes after half-time they took the lead. From Rooney’s corner Vidic seemed to levitate, hovering above the Bayern defence to plant a genuinely thrilling set-piece header into the far corner.
The lead lasted only nine minutes as Bayern's finely woven roving approach play finally paid off with a lovely goal created via that superbly controlled mobile midfield swathe. Advantage Bayern but Moyes will take a little retro tactical acclaim here.
Guardian Service
