At the last, the Bayern Munich steamroller rumbles over the line

Bavarian powerhouse show they are a team who can do something other than lose the Champions League

Barney Ronay

The Observer, Saturday 25 May 2013 22.35 BST

If this really is the dawning of the age of Bavaria it arrived at Wembley with a sense of relief as much as elation at the final whistle for the newly enthroned European champions. Of all possible outcomes – the Dortmund miracle, the steamrollering assertion of Bayern power – this was perhaps the least expected, a victory eked out of a below-par performance in what was still a brilliantly entertaining final.

At points in the first half for Bayern it might have seemed as if it was all happening again, another final slipping way in the face of energetic and fearless opponents. Not this time, though, and Bayern Munich are deserved European champions for just the second time in the past 37 years, the culmination of a decade of deep-rooted reworking of the structures of German football, but more immediately a victory for a brilliantly coherent team that have vaulted every obstacle this season with a sense of muscular fluency and, at the last, unswerving determination. Quite what happens next promises to be almost as interesting.

It wasn't easy right to the end. The moment seemed to stretch out horribly as Arjen Robben's scuffed finish for the 89th-minute winning goal rolled towards the unguarded Borussia Dortmund line. Even here there was agonisingly delayed satisfaction for a team and also perhaps a footballing nation that has carried around the sense that its own dawning mini-era is now at hand a little too long for comfort. And in a way Bayern were in an impossibly tricky position here: so clearly the overdogs; so obviously out‑swanked by the adorably charismatic Jürgen Klopp and his team of boyband-ish overachievers in the pre-match build-up; arriving at Wembley as a team playing not so much to win the Champions League as to show they can do something other than lose it.

Talk of more concerted and enduring triumph for German football is, of course, a fragile presumption. Next year there could equally be two Premier League or two Spanish teams in the final. And yet, as the players warmed up in the late evening sunshine inside a stadium that was relentlessly boisterous for a full hour and a half before kick-off, the air throbbing with migraine-volume German power pop, it was hard not to get a sense of a vibrantly healthy football culture plonked down intact inside this often rather low-key stadium.

Albeit for the opening quarter of the match the Bundesliga champions were a shadow of the team that overran Barcelona in their semi-final. Perhaps there was an element of a prepared response in Bayern's projection of unassailable self-belief in the lead-up to this match. Certainly the approach has been to admit no flaws, to speak only of irrefutable improvement in the last year, to set their sights on that level of annihilating perfection that characterised five of Bayern's previous six matches in this competition.

With this in mind there was something almost alluringly vulnerable in a timid and patchy opening as Bayern were pushed back by the vibrancy of Dortmund's start, the front trio of Marco Reus, Jakub Blaszczykowski and Robert Lewandowski playing with a hard-running sense of freedom in those opening 20 minutes, while Bayern looked not so much like an era-in-waiting as a team trying to make a hill-start in third gear. With 25 minutes gone Europe's emergent power had yet to have a shot on goal, while Dortmund drew four sprawling saves from Manuel Neuer. Bastian Schweinsteiger strutted impatiently, while the Raumdeuter Thomas Müller contented himself not so much with investigating space as serving up a whole load of footballing dead air, wandering down Wembley's congested channels like a tourist in rush hour without a map.

Bayern have some flex in them, though. Even as Dortmund continued to glitter in attack Robben found himself in space running in on goal three times only to prove horribly wasteful. Perhaps on his transatlantic travels Pep Guardiola may have been able to locate somewhere a reliable supplier of half-decent right foots. But with a quarter of the match already behind them, Bayern had finally emerged blinking into the light of this Champions League final. And 15 minutes after the break it was Robben's left foot that created the opening goal, the Dutchman skipping away from two defenders and crossing for the wholehearted Mario Mandzukic, a wonderfully skilled linker of play, to score from close range.

It had been a fluent and entertaining first hour, during which the attacking momentum of Klopp's Dortmund had been the dominant spectacle. To trail 1-0 was a mild injustice, just as the equalising penalty awarded for Dante's kick on Reus was also only half-fair: Dante should have been booked again and sent off. As the minutes ticked down in normal time Dortmund for the first time began to resemble the fast-breaking underdog as Bayern kept the ball. And for all his occasional fragility, Robben was throughout this match the most likely goalscorer on the pitch. If it seemed fitting that a player who missed a penalty in last year's final should score the winner, perhaps more striking is the fact 11 players who started this high-spec European final are available for Germany's World Cup campaign next year.

Beyond this the enduring image will be the 68-year-old Jupp Heynckes, self-contained even in playful abandon, joining the celebrations with the trophy. It will be tempting now to expound on the task facing Guardiola: presiding over the dawning of the wider Bayern supremacy. But really this was simply a moment to relish a wonderful team, a decade in the making, and unarguably now Europe's best.

Taken from the Guardian/Observer