LONDON — Players can have all the skill in the world, but without intensity, they are nothing in the Champions League.
That quality, intensity, was all around the tournament on Tuesday evening. Eight games across Europe ran up a total of 40 goals, a record for one night in the competition. Two teams scored seven times away from home — Bayern Munich won, 7-1 in Rome, and Shakhtar Donetsk hit seven without a reply from BATE Borisov in Belarus.
“This is a fluke,” Pep Guardiola told reporters in the warmth of A.S. Roma’s Stadio Olimpico.
“Scoring a hat trick in a game is fantastic,” said Luiz Adriano, one of the many Brazilians who have settled in with the Ukrainian club Donetsk. “Scoring five is immense.”
Indeed, it is. Adriano, overlooked by his home nation after leaving Brazil as a teenager in 2007, equaled the feat of Lionel Messi, the only other man to have scored five times in one night in the Champions League.
It was close to freezing in Belarus on Tuesday. And when one thinks of Brazil’s failure to find a central striker for its World Cup a few months ago, it seems incredible that Adriano is now thinking seriously of applying for Ukraine citizenship so that he can play for a national team.
Remarkable, too, was his concentration, as he ran in for scoring opportunities among the BATE defenders, who appeared to have no idea of his movements.
After its being exiled from its own stadium in Donetsk because of the fighting in Ukraine, what is so impressive about Shakhtar is its desire to play — and win — on the road.
Desire, with intensity.
That word is synonymous with Bayern Munich and with its coach, Guardiola.
Some 18 months ago, Guardiola was finishing a yearlong sabbatical in New York, recharging himself after leading Barcelona for four remarkable seasons. His Barça teams played beautifully, but they also shut down opponents with an intensity rarely seen in the sport.
But while Guardiola rested, the team that he had built was destroyed in the Champions League, devastated by Munich both home and away in April 2013. Bayern played with a physical and mental intensity that Barcelona, with Messi hamstrung and tired, could not match. Over the two legs of their semifinal, Munich crushed the Catalans with a combined score of 7-0.
Bayern went all the way and won the Champions League that season. Its coach, Jupp Heynckes, then retired to make way for Guardiola’s return.
How, we asked, does a new coach improve upon perfection? Maybe we began to get an answer on Tuesday night in Rome.
Bayern rolled out its might — seven players from the Heynckes era, along with two stars (Mario Götze and Robert Lewandowski) who were plucked from Bayern’s main German rival, Borussia Dortmund — and rolled over Roma.
This result, much more than Shakhtar’s seven goals in Belarus, sent shock waves across the soccer world. Roma is nobody’s fool. It stands second in the Italian league. It largely outplayed Manchester City in the previous round of the competition in England. And its Olimpico is a cauldron of ferocious partisanship when, as on Tuesday, it is filled to its capacity of nearly 70,000. Those fans were at times almost silenced as Bayern overran Roma.
Lewandowski scored with a mighty header. Götze scored with fine stealth. Thomas Müller scored with a cocky penalty kick. The substitutes Franck Ribéry and Xherdan Shaqiri scored when the coach put them on in the second half.
But the first scorer, the player who set the tone for all the rest, was Arjen Robben.
The Dutchman was unstoppable in the first half, just as he so often was for his national team during the World Cup. His opening strike at nine minutes was a miniature masterpiece of art. He controlled a fast-moving ball with a dab of his foot, then he accelerated and he swayed with mesmerizing balance.
When he reached the right edge of Roma’s penalty area, three defenders closed in around him. They did everything right.
They knew how dangerous it is to tackle Robben near the penalty box, either because he is as difficult to pin down as a mouse or because he knows how and when to fall.
This time, however, he did neither of those things. He got rid of the ball before any opponent could touch him. Got rid of it into the net, with that graceful, unpreventable ability that Robben has to curl a shot off his left foot into the top far corner, between the bar and the post.
From that moment on, it was a blitz. After Robben scored again, this time sneaking in behind Ashley Cole with a pace that the defender could not match, Munich was four goals up, with barely 30 minutes on the clock.
The game was effectively over. It is a warning writ large to everyone that the German club is in the mood for more silverware.
“Tonight, they were better than us,” Roma’s coach Rudi García admitted to reporters. “We were spectators. We needed to be tighter and use our players to break out. We collapsed tactically and in terms of our aggressiveness.”
“The physical difference really shocked me,” said García’s key midfielder, Daniele De Rossi, who was outdone by the experienced Philipp Lahm and Xabi Alonso in the center of the field. “It seemed like Barcelona again, with small, rapid players running all over the place.”
Roma couldn’t get near them. And Guardiola spoke nothing near the truth when he described the performance as a fluke.