If you had to choose, which would you choose?
The game itself was spectacular, one for the ages. Bayern 2:1 Borussia, the winning goal scored at 89' by Arjen Robben, who rid himself of the dreaded 'choker' tag in the process – having missed a penalty in last year's final v. Chelsea, and flubbed a golden opportunity for the Dutch v. Spain in the 2010 World Cup Final. It was a game in which the phrase "hate for someone to have to lose" came to mind. A game truly worthy of being a final.
Had the scoreline read Bayern 4:0 at the end, no one would've been surprised. Bayern won the Bundesliga by 25 points this season, running up a ridiculous +80 goal differential in the process that is something straight out of a video game. They carry the moniker FC Hollywood, a jetset glamour club all about flair and style. Their team is so deep that several players who will likely be playing key roles at the World Cup in Brazil next summer couldn't even get on the field at Wembley. Their 7:0 aggregrate destruction of F.C. Barcelona in the Champions League semis made it clear that this was, player for player, the best team in the world. A dominating victory at Wembley simply would have been a coronation, a confirmation of greatness that most of us already knew.
Borussia, meanwhile, finished second in Germany this season. They have a young team which fielded only one legitimate superstar in their Polish striker Lewandowski. Reaching the final was quite an accomplishment for the Yellow Army, and even though they drew 1:1 twice with Bayern during the German season, Borussia were HUGE underdogs. And huge underdogs tend to play cautiously and conservatively – slow the pace, try to keep it close, park a bus in front of their own goal, maybe hope to go 0:0 and extend into extra time. Hell, even teams with far more talent than Borussia do that vs. Bayern. Last year's rather wretched Champions League final saw Chelsea win through one minute of Drogba brilliance and 119 minutes of cynicism, combined with Bayern's inability to hit the broad side of a barn.
Yet here was Borussia going straight out and punching Bayern in the mouth. Young, cocky, positive, a we-do-not-give-a-damn-who-you-are attitude. They buzzed and swarmed like bees the first half hour of the game, dominating play with a full court press straight out of Louisville, pressing Bayern everywhere and attacking the goal from all different directions. But after about the 30' mark, Bayern found their footing, at which point this game turned into a track meet on grass. Up and down, end to end, chances all over the place for either team. It could've been more like 5:4 than 2:1 were it not for the excellent goalkeeping on either side.
It really was a beautiful game to watch. A shame someone had to lose. Which wound up being Borussia, of course. One wondered if expending so much energy early would catch up with them. In the last 30' they gave up two goals in which their defense looked flat and square while the Bayern superstars did just enough to coax a couple balls into the net.
The game winner, in particular, came from a sequence that seemed unremarkable – just a free kick from midfield and a highball lofted lazily down to the edge of the 18. But then it's a bad bounce, chaos, a scramble play, Ribéry's clever backheel to Robben for a first touch and a leap over a sprawling defender into the clear, shifty little shot cross his body loaded with english that barely had enough momentum to reach the goal. Bang, just like that, 2:1 to Bayern. The goal seemingly came out of nowhere, and with the full 90 all but done there was basically no time for Borussia to recover.
And losing a game in such fashion simply magnifies all of the little moments here and there where you wish that you might have done something different. What if THIS hadn't happened ... what if I had done THIS instead of this ... what if THAT bounce had gone our way ... The devil is in the details, and the details will drive you crazy if you let them.
My high school basketball team was eliminated from the state playoffs by 2 points in OT, the winning shot coming with :01 on the clock. This after we'd cheated death at the end of regulation – down 10 with little more than 2:00 to play and we unleashed a furious rally, tying the game late, only to have our opponents take the lead on a basket with about :07 left, after which our point guard made a mad dash end-to-end and dished off a pass for a driving layup at the buzzer. It was such a crazy finish to reguation time that we were certain we would ultimately win in OT, thinking we'd broken their spirit as they gagged away their double-digit margin in the closing minutes. The ultimate result – losing by 2 at the horn – was a shock to the system. Game over, season over, high school career over for 8 of us on that team. I think we sat in the locker room for about 5 minutes without saying a word, a collection of statues. What could you possibly say?
And in retrospect, I would rather we lost 20. I would rather they just kicked our ass and shown they were clearly better than us in all phases of the game. Losing is losing, after all, but it's easier for me personally to acknowledge that an opponent was simply better. We attempt to qualify defeats, attaching terms like 'moral victory.' I personally hate moral victories, because there is implicit in that idea the notion that you could've won but ultimately didn't. You were 'gallant in defeat,' whatever the hell that means.
During the course of a season, of course, you can look back at your losses – the 'moral victories' and the blowouts and the like – and see if/how you've progressed from that point. Mistakes are correctable. Improvement possible. But there are, in the end, no moral victories in finals or elimination games. You lost. It's over. It's on to the next season, if there is one – and such is the nature of sports that no teams are ever exactly composed the same way the following season. Whatever collection of players you've assembled in that moment is a one-time deal. A good number of players on the Borussia side yesterday will likely never be on such as grand a stage again. 2:1 losses on 89' goals in such situations seem even harder to ultimately accept. In a 4:0 blowout, you are clearly second-best – but 2nd best, in an international competition, really is pretty good. It's OK to know you were 2nd best if 1st ultimately didn't seem possible.
I didn't want to hear people telling me, in the aftermath of my high school basketball team's 2-point loss in O.T., what a great game it was. Fuck that. But you know what? It kinda was a great game, now that I think about it 20+ years later ... hmm ...
And as fans and spectators and onlookers, we don't want 4:0 blowouts in Champions League finals. We want great games, memorable games rife with tension which are great theatre. Winners write the history books but have a tendency of doing it the same way over and over – we played great, we were superior, it was destiny, blah blah blah. That's all so boring and predictable. But ironically enough, it's more often the losers who ultimately make a game memorable. Whom other than the most ardent Bayern diehard would've wanted to watch a replay of a 4:0 blowout? But I could watch the video from yesterday's game at Wembley again and again, even though I know the outcome, simply to appreciate what I've seen.
So I applaud Borussia, in the end, for opting to play the way they did – opting for swashbuckling over cowering in their own half of the field all day, being tenacious instead of tentative. Living by the sword and ultimately dying by it. They lost but they damn sure made Bayern work for it, and the club has made a lot of friends in the process. And that does matter. I do believe "they were worthy adversaries," the old martial arts cliché, is about the more sincere compliment you can ever pay a defeated opponent, even if it sucks to hear. (And it does.) Borussia were worthy adversaries, to be sure. They lost, but German football – and, indeed, football as a whole – was a big overall winner.
And we sports lovers have been fortunate this year in that so many finals – the Super Bowl, the NCAA championship, and now the Champions League – that were actually worthy of the title. It also makes for better parties. I've been to more Super Bowl parties that petered out at halftime than I care to remember – warm beer, stale nachos, half-empty bars. Lame. We're all about the parties here at IN PLAY LOSE. It simply cannot be any other way. If you don't have good parties, then what's the point?
