Granit Xhaka (r.) and his Leverkusen colleagues seemed surprised by the resistance from Bergamo around Teun Koopmeiners (l.).
Photo: dpa/Jan Woitas
Sometime late on this cool Irish spring night, when the bus with his colleagues was already waiting to leave, Granit to perfection: overcoming setbacks. “We never had that feeling this year,” said the midfielder about Leverkusen’s first defeat in the penultimate game of the season. Now it’s “time to see which player has a character, which player is able to get up quickly.”
The Werkself, who had dominated every opponent for a year – apart from two or three individual halves – had suddenly found themselves in completely unknown territory. Opponents Atalanta Bergamo ultimately won this final of the Europa League 3-0, just as confidently as Bayer Leverkusen had marched through the Bundesliga season. However, with a completely different style. “We couldn’t play our game, they were better in everything,” coach Xabi Alonso had to say, and Jonas Hofman added: “That wasn’t Bayer-like.”
With almost always fair and yet extremely aggressive defensive behavior, the Italians, trained by the clever Gian Piero Gasperini, had stifled all of Leverkusen’s joy in playing. Whether that was primarily due to the Italians, Leverkusen’s poor form on the day, whether the importance of the game was a hindrance, or whether it was a mixture of everything, will probably never be completely clear. But the symptoms could not be overlooked: the new German champions suffered from the strong physicality of this opponent, and “we didn’t play well in the spaces they left us,” said defense chief Jonathan Tah.
The fact that the Leverkusen team, unlike in all other games, were unable to improve and rise up was certainly due to the fact that they were simply unfamiliar with such an extreme pressure situation in which everything was at stake. Alonso already suspected that this could become a problem. Last week, when asked what he had learned this season, the Spaniard replied: “Actually, you learn the most from defeats.” Such lessons were missing not only for him, but for the entire team.
Sure, the team won a number of points through very late goals in stoppage time, but the challenging moments were never as existential as the situation in this final. Never before have you had a trophy within your grasp and yet lost it in just one day. The former Leipzig player Ademola Lookman, who scored all three goals for Bergamo, took advantage of a bad mistake by Ezeqiuel Palacios to make it 1-0 (12th) and followed up with a second goal in the 26th minute. After half an hour, Leverkusen were afraid of failure omnipresent.
The team looked like sailors who had to navigate through completely unfamiliar waters full of rocks and dangerous currents, while the fright favorite from Italy was very familiar with exactly this environment. For years, Atalanta Bergamo has regularly managed to beat big opponents in this way, most recently in the duel in Liverpool in the quarter-finals, which the team also won 3-0. Bayer, on the other hand, does not have proven mechanisms for such serious moments of crisis. There was also no Plan B ready. Maybe he should have given instructions to play fewer short passes, Alonso thought, but he decided otherwise: “We didn’t want to change our style.”
The term “disenchantment” is used again and again in football, but rarely was it as true as it was that evening, which in the end even served as a consolation for the Bundesliga club. “If you clearly lose, you have to accept it as an athlete and say that they deserve it and we don’t,” said managing director Fernando Carro. Now we have to win the DFB Cup final against 1. FC Kaiserslautern on Saturday in order to bring the great season to a fitting end.
However, the final opponent from the Palatinate will probably learn a lot from the Italians, who have traditionally been in the shadow of their big competitors from the neighboring city of Milan, but can now celebrate the greatest success in their club history. In any case, coach Gasperini contributed a lot to decoding Bayer Leverkusen, with Alonso also saying: “I know that we will learn a lot.” Sports director Simon Rolfes even formulated the resolution to win this European Cup another time, but that’s true will not be possible quickly. In the coming season, Leverkusen will finally play in the Champions League, where the team can grow under completely different resistance than this season, in which nobody could seriously keep up. Until that night in Dublin.
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