Robert Lewandowski's path to glory is stuck at a crossroads

After drawing another big game blank it's time to ask whether Lewandowski is happy with simply being the best striker in Germany or does he crave more?

Lewandowski's career is at risk of standing still (AFP)

The Real Madrid defenders are scattered like rice. A furious Sergio Ramos glares at his team-mates, angrily demanding answers. A browbeaten Raphael Varane stares blankly into space. A forlorn Luka Modric looks on in a mixture of bemusement and alarm, like a child watching his favourite ice cream van burn down.

Meanwhile Robert Lewandowski is wheeling away in celebration, wearing that customary half-grin, half-growl, the sort where you’re never quite sure whether he’s just scored or developed acute bowel pains. This is Lewandowski’s night, the Champions League final beckons, and on a night of high drama, Madrid have simply been swept aside.

Unfortunately, this rather over-elaborate tableau wasn’t drawn from last night at the Bernabeu, but five years ago. Few who saw it will ever forget that evening in Dortmund when Lewandowski knocked four past Jose Mourinho’s reigning La Liga champions. And though he has scored plenty of goals and won plenty of silverware in the intervening period, that semi-final in 2013 remains, remarkably, the closest he has come to tasting Champions League success.

It really wasn’t supposed to be like this. Lewandowski’s move to Bayern Munich in 2014 was meant to mark the point at which both moved on to the next plane; the transfer that would finally establish Bayern alongside Real and Barcelona as Europe’s undisputed power trio, whilst also launching Lewandowski into the Messi-Ronaldo stratosphere, perhaps even succeeding them in time. And yet as Bayern tumbled out of the competition in Madrid on Tuesday night, the thought struck that Lewandowski had become something of an analogue for Bayern as a club: perennial semi-finalist, evergreen nearly-man, the domestic bully who nevertheless falls frustratingly short on the global stage.

Of course, you would be hard-pushed to argue that Lewandowski has done badly at Bayern. Four seasons, four Bundesliga titles, and no noticeable slide in output over that time. He is one short of breaking 40 goals for the third season running, and though he will be 30 this summer, physically he remains at his peak. Bayern chief executive Karl-Heinz Rummenigge has described the murmurs of criticism as “ridiculous”, and certainly if a striker who has scored 105 goals in 124 league games is a problem, then it is one most clubs would be delighted to have.

But Bayern are not most clubs. And games like this - at the Bernabeu, 2-1 down from the first leg - are the sort where the very greatest strikers show their worth. Instead, for the fourth time in a row, Lewandowski came away from these two legs with his tail between them. Bayern had the better of both games, and Lewandowski enjoyed seven chances over the two, at least three of which he would have expected to score. Even his world-class link play was short of its usual level: at the Bernabeu, he completed just four of his 10 passes in the attacking third.

Of course, any striker can have a bad night. Even Cristiano Ronaldo failed to find the net over these two games. But with Lewandowski, the evidence suggests this is becoming part of a pattern. His impressive record of 28 goals in 44 Champions League games for Bayern obscures the fact that the majority of those goals have been scored in group play. Contrast Lewandowski’s scoring rate in the group phase (0.74 goals per game) with the knockout phase (0.52 goals per game), and the quarter-finals onward (0.38 goals per game). The bigger the game, the less we see of him.

Lewandowski's most famous night back in Dortmund in 2013 (AFP)

The Bayern manager Jupp Heynckes made an interesting point afterwards. He didn’t refer to Lewandowski by name, but when he spoke of the way Bayern “lost a little bit of focus inside the box”, it was clear enough who he was talking about. “As a forward, if you’ve been moving about a lot, and then you have to run to the box, you get tired," he said. "And when you get tired, you’re out of focus, you’re out of energy, so you’re not strong enough or lucid enough to shoot.”

Lewandowski’s game has always been about more than goals. His high-energy pressing, his selfless running of the channels, his intelligent link-play, his aerial presence at defensive set-pieces: all of this has made him one of the world’s leading No 9s, an asset to Bayern whether he scores or not. But as he enters his 30s, will he need to adapt? Will he, like Ronaldo, eventually need to curb his running, hone his economy of movement, convert himself into the ultimate penalty-box poacher? Does Lewandowski, in short, need to become more selfish?

Lewandowski's heroics of five years ago seem a world away (AFP)

Back in Germany, fans are more divided on this issue than you might think. Even as Lewandowski’s goals fire them to a sixth consecutive Bundesliga, his stock has undeniably fallen. The Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich’s largest newspaper, described him as a “winter player, whose knees start knocking when the really big games arrive in April and May”. On German television, Oliver Kahn took up the theme. “I see too little of him in these games,” he complained after the first leg. “He is not doing justice to his status in the game.”

Meanwhile, tales of unrest and speculation over his future continue to trickle out of Sabernerstrasse, fuelled in part by Lewandowski’s decision to change agents in February, ditching long-time associate Cezary Kucharski in favour of Pini Zahavi, the man who secured Neymar’s transfer away from Barcelona. Around the same time, reports emerged of a furious row with Mats Hummels at training, during which Hummels is said to have warned him about his attitude. And according to Bild, Lewandowski’s team-mates are becoming increasingly disheartened by his lack of motivation, with Heynckes forced to step in recently after a series of increasingly torpid sessions.

Lewandowski failed to fire against Madrid this time around (Bongarts)

How much truth is there in all of this? Impossible to say. But the feeling remains that as he approaches 30, as he prepares to play in his first World Cup, as he approaches what will probably be his last big contract, Lewandowski is at something of a crossroads. Confidence was never going to be an issue for a player whose university thesis was about himself, and titled “RL9: Path to Glory”. Nevertheless, there are questions to answer. Has he taken Bayern as far as he can? What sort of player is he going to be in three years’ time? Will he ever dominate a big game as he dominated that semi-final in 2013? And is he happy with simply being the best striker in Germany? Or does he crave more?