Seldom has the comeback had a more powerful currency in elite football than in this, the week of the great turnarounds in the Champions League. Certainly, there will be clubs across Europe, chasing success or battling for survival, inspired by it all, who hope transforming the improbable into reality is a contagion.
At Borussia Dortmund, for one. On Tuesday Dortmunders watched with undiminished fondness for Jurgen Klopp how their ex-manager engineered Liverpool a place in the European Cup final, against staggering odds. Klopp was in charge of Dortmund the last time they upset the Bundesliga's established hierarchy, and beat Bayern Munich to the league title. That was 2012, the second of two successive first-place finishes for Dortmund.
Bayern have won all the German league titles since, and this weekend will make it a seven-year run if they win at RB Leipzig or better whatever result Dortmund can achieve against Fortuna Dusseldorf. There is still a final matchday left of the campaign after that, and, with a four-point advantage, Bayern would like to make the last day the sort of ceremonial occasion they are accustomed too, though it will be more tinged with relief than any they are used to. Last season the final table had them fully 21 points clear of second-placed Schalke; not once since 2013 has the gap between Bayern’s gold medallists and the next-best’s silvers been fewer than 10 points.
The chase this time has had to be stealthier, and if they complete it, will rank as quite a comeback. Dortmund have led the table on 21 matchdays of the 32 played. In late January they had nine points of headroom above Bayern, whose sense of their own fragility was soon to be emphasised by the visit of Klopp's Liverpool in the Champions League in March. Bayern lost 3-1 to Liverpool at the Allianz, although they could console themselves that Dortmund would not be stealing ahead of them in that competition: Tottenham Hotspur, Liverpool's stablemates in the paddock of heroic comeback kings of Europe, demolished Dortmund 4-0 on aggregate at the same last-16 stage.
Those dents to pride were felt across Germany, and linger, particularly while the backdraft of a wretched World Cup for the national team is still strong. Domestically, Dortmund had promised a sense of zesty renewal. They won six of their first eight Bundesliga matches, and scored four or more goals in five of those victories; young players like Jadon Sancho - 19 years old and the division’s leading provider of assists - and Achraf Hakimi, 20, played leading parts in the Dortmund blitz through the autumn, and the renaissance of Marco Reus, as captain, after his injury-stricken years spread a feelgood factor.
Which is partly why at the end of April, Reus’ red card in the derby against Schalke, a 4-2 home defeat, felt like a point of no return, the emblem of a dream crushed for the black-and-yellow challengers. As it happened Bayern also dropped points that weekend, on matchday 30 or the 34, by drawing against Nuremberg, but it was a rare hitch in a sequence that has yielded the Bavarians 32 points from their last available 36, a sequence including the 5-0 pounding of Dortmund in Munich.
The defending champions are entitled to congratulate themselves on their compelling comeback from a brittle first third of the season under a relatively young and inexperienced manager, Niko Kovac, who was brought in from Eintracht Frankfurt last summer and obliged to look veterans like Franck Ribery and Arjen Robben in the eye knowing he was barely a decade their senior and carried a far less glittering CV than they do.
Whether Kovac remains part of Bayern once Ribery and Robben have gone, as they both will at the end of the season, is uncertain. A league-and-cup double is possible - Bayern meet Leipzig in the German Cup final on May 25 - a double which would normally act as two strong reasons to endorse Bayern’s decision to back their hunch on Kovac. But word is that, within the executive ranks, there are doubts about the Croatian’s readiness to oversee what will be a significant overhaul in the summer, and whether he is the man to restore Bayern’s status in a Champions League where English Premier League clubs have retaken pole position and the serial German champions have not reached a final for six years now.
Kovac noted, last weekend, as Bayern extended their lead at the summit via a 3-1 win over Hannover, that he had felt his players weren’t hearing him as he bellowed instructions from his technical area. “Maybe I’m just not loud enough,” he ventured. It was an easy symbol: He is managing club that wants to make a noise across the globe. Yet another Bundesliga shield goes only so far in doing that, especially while a Champions League Bayern exited long ago is finishing with its amplifiers turned up to maximum.
