Bayern, Dortmund take battle for league title to final day

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This article was published 18/05/2019 (2643 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WITH the championships of England, France, Italy and Spain already decided, Germany’s remains the only division of Europe’s “Big Five” without a winner. That will change today, when Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund conclude an enthralling title race that has come down to the campaign’s final 90 minutes.

Bayern could have secured a seventh successive Bundesliga crown in their last match against RB Leipzig, but a scoreless draw against the third-placed team opened the door for second-ranked Dortmund, who will look to pip Bayern to the shield should the leaders slip up again against a strong Eintracht Frankfurt side.

Dortmund, for their part, are coming off a dramatic 3-2 victory at home to Fortuna Dusseldorf, in which both teams found the back of the net in extra time. They’ve won, drawn and lost in their previous three outings and have been wildly inconsistent since the beginning of February, winning only seven of 14 matches, and don’t exactly have a straightforward final assignment in the form of Borussia Monchengladbach, who are fourth.

But wouldn’t it be something if Die Schwarz-Gelben — built around a resurgent and healthy Marco Reus and reliant on youngsters Jadon Sancho and Christian Pulisic, 19 and 20 years old, respectively — managed to leapfrog mighty Bayern on the final day. Given his extraordinary breakthrough season, Sancho, already an England international, will almost certainly switch to a Premier League club during the summer, and Pulisic has already signed with Chelsea.

This, then, is something of an end of a cycle at Dortmund, and a title would see off their outgoing players nicely.

It’s the full-blown end of an era at Bayern, however, so it’s rather difficult to see them throwing this away. Franck Ribery, 36, and Arjen Robben, 35, will exit Die Roten at season’s end, and while neither is likely to start at home to Frankfurt, they may both get an Allianz-Arena send-off if the match, and the shield, is under wraps late on.

The pair of wingers has been central to the latest generation of Bayern success, which culminated with the treble in 2013, and as Ribery remarked in a recent interview with the Bundesliga’s official website, he and Robben brought much-needed pace and dynamism— “a different type of football”— when they established their partnership in 2009. Robben added: “From the very first day, it was clear that we would get on well due to us both having the same passion for football along with a very similar style of playing… Playing together has always worked wonderfully.”

The two will take their final Bayern bows on May 25 in the DFB-Pokal final against Leipzig in Berlin.

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