DUESSELDORF, Germany — Six years and 39 games. That’s how long it’s been since Bayern Munich lost a Champions League group stage game.
That makes Tuesday’s game against Bayern an especially daunting task for Manchester United. After its own loss to Bournemouth, United needs to beat Bayern to have any chance of avoiding an embarrassingly early exit from the Champions League.
Bayern — which is already qualified for the knockout stages — won’t just be playing to add a 40th game to that unbeaten record. After a shock 5-1 loss to Eintracht Frankfurt on Saturday, forward Thomas Müller called on his teammates to show their emotion at Old Trafford.
“There has to be a reaction following this. We need to tap into our anger, but we can’t lose our heads,” he said.
The Frankfurt game was much closer than the score suggests — Bayern actually had four more shots than its opponent — but Bayern is keen to bounce back.
Midfielder Leon Goretzka suggested Bayern hadn’t been helped by having 10 days without a game after its last Bundesliga match was called off because of heavy snow. He told broadcaster ZDF that Bayern had been training well, though “we couldn’t have sensed in training that we’d fallen into a hole, but after kickoff today it looked very much like that.”
Against United, Bayern needs to show the Frankfurt loss was just a “slip-up,” Goretzka said.
The scoreboard shows the final score after the German Bundesliga soccer match between Eintracht Frankfurt and Bayern Munich at Deutsche Bank Park in Frankfurt, Germany, Saturday, Dec. 9, 2023. Credit: AP/Arne Dedert
It was Bayern’s third loss of the season but the first with England captain Harry Kane in the starting lineup.
Kane had tasted defeat on his debut for Bayern against Leipzig in the German Super Cup in August, but on that occasion Bayern was already 2-0 down before Kane came on for a half-hour cameo — and he had the excuse of having been up late the night before for a medical and contract…
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