Bayern Munich 4-3 Real Madrid: Champions League Match Report

Seven goals, five of them before the interval: Bayern 4-3 Real Madrid, in the second leg of a quarter-final Bayern had brought home from the Bernabéu with a 2-1 lead.

The half-time score is where this match lives. Bayern 2-3 Real Madrid — five goals inside forty-five minutes, the visitors ahead on the night, and the tie level at 4-4 on aggregate with a half still to play. Whatever shape a home side defending a first-leg advantage had intended to hold, it was gone by the break, and Bayern went into the interval needing to win the second half outright to stay in the competition.

They won it 2-0. Real Madrid did not score again. A first period that produced five goals was followed by one that produced two, both to the same side, and that asymmetry is the whole margin of the tie: 4-3 on the night, 6-4 across the two legs.

The contrast with the first leg is stark. That one had been a controlled affair — 0-1 to Bayern at the break in Madrid, a goal each after it, 2-1 at the finish. The return resembled it in no respect. Three of Real Madrid's four goals in the tie arrived inside a single forty-five-minute stretch in Munich, and it still was not enough, because Bayern responded to a chaotic first half with a second half in which they conceded nothing.

Bayern advanced to the semi-finals on a 6-4 aggregate, and the manner of it matters more than the margin does. They had led the tie by a goal on arrival, surrendered that lead entirely before half-time at home, and rebuilt it into a two-goal cushion in the forty-five minutes that followed. The comfortable-looking final aggregate existed for less than half the match.

For Real Madrid it is elimination at the quarter-final stage, and an unusually harsh version of it. Scoring three times away from home in a knockout leg is the sort of performance that normally settles a tie in your favour; here it left them level at the interval and beaten by two by the end. Four goals conceded on the road across two legs is what ended their campaign, not any failure to score.

Our pre-match call was Bayern Win at 1.63. It landed, though not by the route the price implied. At 1.63, with the draw at 5.33 and a Real Madrid win at 4.90, the market was paying for a controlled evening from a side already ahead in the tie and at home.

What arrived instead was a seven-goal match in which the selection was losing at half-time and the aggregate advantage had been wiped out. High confidence proved the right rating on the outcome and the wrong one on the path to it: Bayern did win, and did go through, but anyone holding this bet spent forty-five minutes behind before the second half settled it. Verdict: won