This season the football coach Vincent Kompany has shown again and again that he can win even without his best players. Without Manuel Neuer (fifteen times). Without Joshua Kimmich (five times). Without Luis Díaz (four times). Without Harry Kane (four times). And even without Michael Olise (three times). But before the most important game of the season so far, the question suddenly arises as to whether FC Bayern Munich’s best players can win without their coach.
Paris, Parc de Princes. As Kompany sits in the Paris Saint-Germain stadium on Monday evening wearing a dark jacket and white shirt, he talks to the reporters who will cover the game on Tuesday evening (9 p.m., live on Amazon Prime Video and in the FAZ ticker) will be viewed from about the same distance as him. And although he has just said again that he will extend his ban for this semi-final first leg Champions League If he thinks it’s “not fair” – he received his third yellow card in the competition in the quarter-final second leg against Real Madrid because he complained too loudly from the referee’s point of view – he can also make a joke about it all. “I’m 1.92,” he says, “so I don’t fit in this laundry box.”
Kompany will not do the Mourinho
In the press room, Kompany was asked about José Mourinho, the Portuguese coach who worked for Chelsea in 2005 and who illegally sneaked into the dressing room before a Champions League quarter-final game despite the ban. When the UEFA employee who was supposed to look after Mourinho was looking for him, he said many years later, he had a club employee smuggle him out of the locker room in a laundry box.
A UEFA employee is supposed to check on Tuesday that Kompany has no contact with his team before or during the game. And even if one could say, looking at Bayern’s style of play, that nobody in world football is more familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of man-marking, Kompany will not be Mourinho. Because he has always said this season that he not only trusts his players, but also his staff. And in his case everything so far suggests that these are not just words.
The Englishman Aaron Danks, the assistant coach of the team, will be in charge on the sidelines on Tuesday evening FC Bayernwho is responsible for the so-called standard situations. And if you believe central defender Dayot Upamecano, who answered reporters’ questions shortly before Kompany, it makes no difference to the players. He says of Kompany: “We worked with him all season, we internalized that.”
There is actually no reason why one should doubt Upamecano’s assessment. And yet there was a moment on Monday evening that showed why Kompany could be missing his players on the sidelines. When a reporter pointed out to him shortly before the end of the press conference that this Bayern team had already scored 167 goals this season, as many as FC Barcelona with strikers Messi, Neymar and Suárez, and then asked him why this Bayern team was special, Kompany answered in his Kompany way. Because his players are special because they have special abilities. Everything else, he says, is subject to discussion, “magic tricks”. But Kompany didn’t mean to say that he was a magician because of his tactics and his man-marking, but rather that the magic of this game always comes from the players. His role is to keep pushing these players forward.
Vincent Kompany can become a great coach because he understands that it is players who win games like the one on Tuesday. And even the greatest players can use a coach who understands this.
