A fever dream of a day in Munich took place under a relentless Bavarian sun that made even the city’s stone sweat.
It began with Bayern Munich breaking the German transfer record and ended with RB Leipzig routing the Bundesliga champions in the Allianz Arena. Thomas Tuchel ripped into his defence live on television. Joshua Kimmich was whistled and jeered by his own supporters. And Harry Kane was there, too.
Advertisement
What a melodrama; this promises to be quite the adventure.
The night before it began, Tuchel spent the evening at Grunwalder Stadion.
It sits to the south of the city; a wide, concrete bowl of a place, with steepling floodlights from a different era. While the rest of the world was tracking jets and training lenses, Tuchel was sat in its main stand, with his baseball cap pulled down, watching Bayern’s second team draw 2-2 with Nurnberg.
It was a perfect night for football. A small band of ultras banged their drums and sang their songs in the stand opposite. An elderly woman sold bratwurst in bread rolls. And, as the dusk gathered, Bayern’s youngsters played well enough in the calm of a Friday night to give their senior head coach something to think about.
A few hundred yards away, nothing was still and nothing was calm. A great mess of fans and media thronged around Sabener Strasse, Bayern Munich’s headquarters, waiting for the most expensive player in the history of German football to arrive. They jostled for position and primed their cameras and when Kane did appear, in a gleaming, Bayern-red Audi, phones were thrust at its windows, like a scene from outside a court hearing.
Kane is a world-class footballer but he is not an easy superstar. Those cameras thrust at his car’s windows caught that side of him, as
Read on theathletic.com