For Robert Lewandowski, repetition is the only secret. You start with instinct, a natural aptitude for striking a ball and being in the right position to receive it, and then you hone it through repetition.
Every training session, every day: make the run, take the touch, work out where the goalkeeper wants you to shoot, work out where you want him to think you are shooting. And the repetition never stops, because you are aiming for perfection in a sphere where perfection doesn’t exist.
Still, Lewandowski has come close over the last 12 months. There are more naturally talented players in world football; he would happily accept that. But there are none who have been as consistently dominant over his opponents of late.
After six straight seasons of scoring 40 or more goals in all competitions, Lewandowski went into overdrive. Gerd Muller’s Bundesliga record, once considered a permanent statue to Der Bomber’s majesty, has fallen.
It’s only a vague theory, but you wonder whether lockdown inspired this ludicrous prolificacy. While others rested and recuperated, Lewandowski had a window in which to focus on his obsession of self-improvement.
The stories of his monastic dedication – from eating his dessert before main course to enable better digestion to sleep therapists to physical education degrees – have become folklore.
Since the return of German football in May 2020, Lewandowski has scored 89 goals in 73 matches. Even in the age of Messi and Ronaldo, during which our expectations of elite goalscoring was shifted by two coexisting freaks, he is leading the way.
And he is leading the way at 33. Even if the chances come more freely when your club dominates its domestic league; even if the team has learned that creating chances for you is its easiest route to victory; even at a time when sports science and nutrition has extended the length of elite performance – it is still not normal to peak in your 30s.
It is as if Lewandowski is feasting off the karmic rewards for his obsession, granted an ability not just to slow his own natural decline but to postpone it.
The first thing to say about Lewandowski is that this was never really meant to happen. He was afforded a leg-up thanks to two sporting parents, but he was a spindly, scrawny child who was released by Legia Warsaw at 17 and joined Znicz Pruszków in the Polish third tier.
Rejection hardly bars a player from enjoying a successful professional career – the game is littered with hard-knock stories – but it certainly didn’t foretell Lewandowski becoming the best striker in the world.
When he joined Dortmund at 21, it was for a cut-price €4.5million (now about £3.8m). The failed move to Blackburn Rovers is infamous, but Lewandowski was a medical away from joining Genoa before their president pulled the plug.
Instead, Lewandowski’s career became a triumph of nurture over nature. He worked under Jurgen Klopp, who taught him the hunger to score goals and acted as the “bad teacher” that toughened him up. He worked under Pep Guardiola, who Lewandowski says taught him about the importance of tactics to an individual’s success. He worked under Carlo Ancelotti, who he describes as “an uncle” for the way in which he would offer advice. He worked under Jupp Heynckes and Hansi Flick, who emphasised the importance of his connection to Bayern Munich. Lewandowski is a community project: Five chefs, one dish.
Those managers weren’t all naturally fans of an imposing No 9. Guardiola had his vision for a team of diminutive, technical midfielders. Klopp was intent on implementing his gegenpressing system based on intensity without the ball forcing turnovers.
To them, Lewandowski might have appeared as an anachronism, a throwback to the age of the single-function centre forward. But Lewandowski impressed both with his willingness to learn attributes outside of his comfort zone and became an all-rounder.
“He is the most professional player I have ever met,” says Guardiola. “In his head, he thinks about the right food, sleep and training: 24 hours a day. He is always there – never injured – because he focuses on these things.”
Klopp agrees: “What he has made out of his potential, how he pushed himself to become the player he is today, that’s extraordinary. He has immersed himself in the game, he just knows in every situation what he has to do, where he has to go. Lewy is an absolute machine.”
That closing word from Klopp, “machine”, leaves an uneasy taste in the mouth, because there is certainly something distinctly robotic to Lewandowski: the tall, lithe frame, the sense that everything is coming to him so easily, the unerring consistency, the long line of Bundesliga opponents lining up to be trampled on.
There are other elite forwards built in the same mould, but Lewandowski even lacks the pantomime schtick of Cristiano Ronaldo and Zlatan Ibrahimovic. He simply stays quiet and gets on with goalscoring, like some super-charged GoalBot3000. We are left running our fingers over his reputation, searching for the rough edge. That can be mistranslated as a lack of personality.
And yet the basic ingredients of Lewandowski’s story are emphatically human. He was a kid that did not possess an other-worldly natural talent but worked his arse off to become the best at what he does. He was rejected and written off due to his size, and became a physical specimen as a response.
He puts his obsession with training down to losing his father at the age of 16: “When I do extra training, I tell myself ‘I am doing this for him’ and that is good motivation”. If the end result is a little robotic, the process is founded in romance.
Lewandowski may not win the Ballon d’Or; just another year in which he is beaten by one of the two super-freaks of the modern game. This might be his last chance, having been favourite until last week.
He will eventually slow down soon; not even he can slow down the passing of time. But until then, he will keep doing what he does, over and over and over again: make the run, take the touch, work out where the goalkeeper wants you to shoot, work out where you want him to think you are shooting.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3DXQvsO
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