Ian Hawkey
At any other club, the loss of two highly creative, attacking midfield players on the eve of a major Champions League collision might be thought grave.
At Arsenal, who host the competition’s title-holders tonight in the first leg of the last-16 stage, the loss of Theo Walcott from the wing and Aaron Ramsey from the engine room certainly looks like a weakening of options.
But for their guests, injuries to Franck Ribery and Xherdan Shaqiri may actually make some of Bayern Munich head coach Pep Guardiola’s decisions a little simpler.
Ribery, who placed third in last month’s Ballon d’Or rankings for the finest individual player of 2013, is recovering from a burst blood vessel in his upper thigh and will miss the fixture. Shaqiri, Switzerland’s leading light, is out too, and cursing his bad luck.
Ribery’s absence opened up an opportunity for Shaqiri to start a match at the weekend and the Swiss reminded Bayern’s hierarchy and their supporters why the club agreed to pay Basel nearly €12 million (Dh60.4m) for him two years ago, at age 20.
Shaqiri scored twice in the 4-0 win over Freiburg, doubling his number of goals in Bayern’s prolific, dominant domestic campaign. Shaqiri has only started six times this season, so that is a potent tally.
To be a midfield player with the reigning European champions is to face intense competition for a first-team spot, and to each week fear the label of expendability.
Guardiola, who took over at Bayern last July, would probably not have it any other way, though the huge depth of resources available to him in positions five to 11 do present the odd challenge to his management skills.
Guardiola inherited a roster of treble winners, confident players with a happy balance of technical assets. He had the luxury of watching them in detail, while he was undistracted and unemployed, in the time between his appointment as Bayern coach, last January, and actually taking over.
Under Jupp Heynckes, Bayern in those six moths seized the Bundesliga, German Cup and Champions League trophies. Guardiola, meanwhile, filled his notebook: He saw Javi Martinez, his Spanish compatriot, contribute, as a long-legged ball-winner at the base of midfield in Martinez’s first season as the most expensive signing in Bayern’s history.
He watched Bastian Schweinsteiger, a German national-team mainstay, maturing in his central midfield role. He analysed Toni Kroos, the precocious German international, as he displayed his spread of assets in different roles.
Guardiola purred at how Thomas Muller thrived as an instinctive finder of space around the opposition penalty box. He spotted Shaqiri adapting to German football, and admired the sophistication of his left-footed delivery.
He thrilled to the athleticism and ambition of David Alaba, the young left-back who plays in midfield for his native Austria, and glimpsed a southpaw equivalent of the marauding Dani Alves, the full-back-cum-winger Guardiola managed at Barcelona, where the coach made his name.
What Guardiola did next was intriguing. He authorised the Bayern hierarchy to pursue the signature of Mario Gotze, Borussia Dortmund and Germany’s skilled attacking midfielder, and, well ahead of taking up his new post, he began to hatch plans for the transformation of Philipp Lahm, the Bayern and Germany captain, to be transformed from the most complete right-back in the world game to Bayern’s base midfielder and dictator of strategy. Lahm has done the job with aplomb.
Under Guardiola, Bayern have gone from victory to victory, with no defeats and two draws in the Bundesliga, and one loss in Europe, after they had secured qualification to the knock-out stage. They dominate possession with their heavily manned midfield.
Strikers? Mario Mandzukic, the effective centre-forward of Heynckes’s successful 2012/13, is frequently left out so that Gotze or Muller can play in a withdrawn central-striking role.
Bayern’s success, like that of Guardiola’s Barcelona in the period from 2008 to 2012, is about dominating midfield, mastering possession.
In theory, there cannot be too many great midfielders on their staff. In practice, there may be too many.
Two weeks ago, during Bayern against Stuttgart, Kroos reacted angrily to being substituted. Among Guardiola’s challenges is the task of making his many talented midfielders buy into the idea that they will be rested and rotated so that his intensive pressing-and-passing game never stales.
Tonight, he will line up very carefully his combination of ball-winners, distributors, galvanizers and thinkers.
Officially, Bayern will line up three in midfield. In practice, with Alaba advancing, Robben retreating, Martinez and Lahm protecting defence, the midfield will be five or six strong.
“Arsenal have a very good midfield,” Guardiola said before his team left Munich for London.
Not aboard the flight were Shaqiri and Ribery.
But man for man, the Guardiola cargo still looks a more than adequate match for the high-class midfield ensemble Arsene Wenger will configure.
sports@thenational.ae
