Welcome to the FC Bayern Campus Round Up, where the matches of Bayern Munich’s U-23, U-19 and U-17 squads are recapped, line ups are provided and the highlights to the matches are hyperlinked on top of their respective score line. Due to the September international break, only the U-23s played this weekend. Remember, highlights for each match can be watched for free once one has established an account on Bayern’s website.
Information on the matches of the U-23s is provided by the official FC Bayern
website here. If you wish to learn more about the format of the U-17 and U-19’s youth leagues and what is at stake, you can find more info here. Without further ado, here is the round up:
Bayern II (U-23s) 4-3 TSV Schwaben Augsburg, Matchday 10
Bayern lineup: Bärtl – Manuba, Heindl, Pavlić, Ajayi – Olychenko (83. Gashi), Lambe, Codjo-Evora, (71. Binder), Della Rovere (46. Degraf) – Heinz (90. Matosevic), Assomo (72. Wilson)
Goals: 1:0 Heinz (27.), 1:1 Rehwald (36.), 2:1 Codjo-Evora (51.) 2:2 Schäfer (73.), 2:3 Schäfer (75.), 3:3 Heindl (89.), 4:3 Wilson (90+2.)
Unused subs: Klanac – Wimmer, Kim, Sadat, Binder.
Unavailable players: Louis Richter, Leonard Prescott, Tarek Buchmann, Chivano Wijks, Maycon Cardozo [Roko Mijatović, Filip Pavić, Cassiano Kiala, David Santos Daiber, Matouš Srb on international duty]
Position: 10., 14 points
Though the U-17s and U-19s will not play during the international break, the U-23s have decided not to request postponement for any of their fixtures during this time period. It is not hard to see why, either. Though 5 players are away, the squad remains formidable and could afford to sit Tim Binder, Mudaser Sadat and Kim for 90 minutes. The squad is just too large, there is too little game time to go around and it will need to be trimmed down in January. Too many young players are not playing enough, even with the internationals gone.
But that is a case for another time. Bayern welcomed relegation threatened TSV Schwaben Augsburg to their home, eager to repeat their past impressive performances against the visitors. The game started well, too, as the Bavarians dominated the match, created their chances (survived a huge scare) and then took the lead fortuitously as a visiting defender decided to control the ball in the area with their hand. Heinz converted the penalty to take the lead.
But Bayern were prone to serious collapses in this game. One such collapse happened after the goal, allowing Schwaben Augsburg back into the match and letting them dominate the ball. They had chances to score before they found their equalizer, and it was a very poorly defended goal. The Schwaben left winger managed to evade right back Vincent Manuba and sprinted along the outside of the box. In this case, the center back normally steps out to put pressure on him, but center back David Heindl stayed back and relied on the desperately chasing back Manuba to pressure the winger. This gave the winger all the time in the world to pick the cross, allowing him to see how their #10 peeled away from Allen Junior Lambe without the latter noticing at all and deliver a perfect cross. The #10 could not miss from there.
Bayern turned up the pressure before half-time and kept up the pace in the second half, with Bastian Assomo’s deflected pass landing to Noah Codjo-Evora to regain the lead. Generally, the team looked comfortable and set to bring the win home.
Then there was another moment of poor coordination as David Heindl failed to win the ball, the defense could not reassemble in time and Schwaben Augsburg poured numbers into the box to get the header and score the equalizer. Just two minutes later, more confused defensive positioning left the top of the right side of the box to be defended by right winger Artur Degraf with no backup. The winger understandably could not defend the attacker, which left him with a lot of time and space to take a shot. Neither center back Raphael Pavlić nor goalkeeper Jannis Bärtl look good as the latter spills the ball into an inviting area and the former completely loses track of his man. All of a sudden, a comfortable lead turned into a 2-3 deficit.
Bayern noticeably started panicking. Passing patterns disappeared, they were hoofing the ball up the field and unable to defend the confident visitors. Schwaben Augsburg should have made it 2-4 a few times.
But football games can change so quickly. To Bayern’s credit, they never stopped trying. Instead, they kept pushing players up into the last line and played it fast to the front, hoping to get a lucky bounce. That they did as Heindl found himself open in the box and the center back shoved it in in the 90th minute. A similar strategy saw the ball fall to Wilson in the box, who brilliantly deceived the defenders and the goalkeeper by improbably slotting it into the goal when they all expected a pass.
It was an incredible comeback and it should not be discounted. But, for all of the team’s improvements and recent uptick in form under Dante, some of the team’s defending as a group is truly awful. Too often, the defenders struggle to communicate and make fairly simple defensive decisions. It is a problem that has cropped up in every single one of the team’s 10 games thus far and needs to be addressed.
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