Football News: Bayern Munich cruised into the Champions League quarter-finals with a 7-1 win over Red Bull Salzburg at home on Tuesday, thanks to a record-breaking 11-minute hat-trick by Robert Lewandowski. As Bayern shook off their early fears to beat Salzburg, the Polish striker had three goals by the 23rd minute, the earliest anyone has ever achieved a hat-trick in a Champions League game. “This was clearly a statement from us, and it gives us hope that there will be more like this in the future,” Bayern captain Manuel Neuer told Amazon Prime after his team reached the final eight for the 20th time in their history.
Salzburg had held Bayern to a 1-1 draw in the first leg, but their chances of pulling off an upset in the second leg were dashed when Lewandowski scored a tap-in and two penalties to send Bayern to a legendary triumph.
It was the quickest of Lewandowski’s six hat-tricks in the Champions League, with only ten minutes and 27 seconds between his first and third goals.
“We knew we had to attack the box early today and get Lewy into the game because he’s so difficult to stop,” Thomas Mueller said.
“We all knew how important this game was today. If we had been knocked out, it would have been a very sad next three months for us,” he added.
Bayern opened with an attacking 3-5-2 formation, but their defence appeared jittery, and chances were created at both ends in the first few minutes.
With the first attack of the game, Lewandowski forced a fine save from Philipp Koehn, while Kingsley Coman’s brilliant block denied Nicolas Capaldo at the other end.
After being pulled down in the box by Maximilian Woeber, Lewandowski gratefully slotted away a penalty to give Bayern the lead on 12 minutes.
Bayern’s nerves were frayed early on, and Salzburg came close to equalising when Nicolas Seiwald fizzed a furious shot over the bar at the other end.
But Lewandowski was in a predatory mode, and he quickly scored two more to complete his hat-trick and put the Austrians on the back foot.
He added a third on the counter-attack, pursuing a loose ball across the line following a one-on-one with Koehn, after slamming a second penalty into the bottom corner to increase the lead.
After an excellent passing move on the half-hour mark, Serge Gnabry hammered home a crushingly obvious fourth goal for Bayern.
Soon after halftime, Mueller curled a fantastic strike into the bottom corner to make it 5-0, and Bayern moved to cruise control.
20 minutes from time, the visitors scored a consolation goal on a clinical counter-attack, with 18-year-old Dane Maurits Kjaergaard slamming a Geoff-Hurst-like finish past Manuel Neuer.
But it was the visitors who had the final say, as Mueller scored his second and Lewandowski set up Sane for Bayern’s seventh goal only minutes before the end.
For football match, football live score, football team, football club, football result and other football news follow livematchupdatesnews.com.
