In front of some 66,000, mostly FC Bayern München fans and in their own Allianz Arena home stadium – Chelsea of London, defeated Bayern Munich in the final of the Champions League last night after a penalty shootout and thus are recipients of the most lucrative prize in European football.
The capture of this Cup with the ‘Big Ears’ for Chelsea means the first European Cup / Champions League which it has ever won. The Londoners take their revenge for the lost finals in Moscow in 2008, when Manchester United – also ending in a penalty shootout – was too strong.
In regular time Chelsea showed resilience by coming from behind after a very attractive late strike from Thomas Müller in the 83rd minute to make – which Bayern plans had every reason to believe was going to be the winner and deciding goal.
However Didier Drogba – the big striker from Ivory Coast -headed home after 88 minutes with a brilliant header from Chelsea’s only corner in the game and tied the game in the last minutes. Not much happened in the two 15 minute halves of overtime.
At age 34, Drogba still has amazing physical strength, great heading ability in the air, and unlike many of his English team members, an ability to retain possession of the ball.
Arjen Robben had earlier missed a penalty late in the game in the 2nd half when it was still tied at 1-1 after ninety minutes, but he was not the only one who did not hit home from eleven meters.
In the shoot-out series for Chelsea Juan Mata Chelsea missed the first penalty and failures by Ivica Olic and Bastian Schweinsteiger made a hero of the Chelsea goal-keeper Petr Cech .
It then remained only for Drogba to put in the winning penalty shot –which he duly did and it was all over.
Congratulations to Chelsea!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2012/may/19/bayern-munich-chelsea-ratings
http://www.kicker.de/news/fussball/chleague/startseite/569276/2/slideshow_fiasko-dahoam.html
Read about the 2010 final- http://www.ota-berlin.de/blog/03/26/may-15th-at-the-olympic-stadium-berlin-dfb-pokal-2010-german-cup-final-will-be-between-werder-bremen-bayern-munich/
OTA-Berlin building at Rosa Luxemborg Platz will provide its apartments for the supporters of both teams – the U2 U-bahn stops at the Olypmic Stadium.
See also – http://www.euro-2012-blog.com/
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London Chelsea win 2012 Champions League in shoot-out and beat Bayern München at home who fail to land knock-out punch during full 90 min- by OTA-Berlin contributor Mr Filip v d Plas from OTA Berlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany License. If you use this article or parts of it, please refer to http://www.ota-berlin.de.
Tags: arjen robben, Bastian Schweinsteiger, bayern munchen, Chelsea goal-keeper Petr Cech, Didier Drogba, german football cup 2012 berlin, german soccer cup 2012, Ivica Olic, Juan Mata Chelsea, London Chelsea win 2012 Champions League in shoot-out and beat Bayern München, “Respect’! No place for racism”.
I watched the last 10 minutes of the match plus extra-time and penalties and all I have to say is the announcer on Sportsnet was extremely unprofessional and should be fired if he doesn’t apologize.
After Bayern scored, he said it was over and that Muller had given the Germans the win. I thought to myself – but there’s still 10 minutes to go so what is this idiot talking about. No sonner had the thought crossed my mind that Chelsea scored. I believe the guy is from a British televions, Sky or something similar but he is irresponsible and unprofessional and has no business calling games.
Having said this, this game was a classic example of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. Twice Munich had a lock on this game and twice they let it slip away. We all know the old saying – it’s never over…………..
What I especially bothers me is that a football team to forget everything and still can win -when you see the big names at Chelsea, and yet they play so defensively……….and only start to play when the team trailed 1-0 …….this is not good football.
Bayern Munich have little to blame themselves for other than missing 3 penalties -they tried to play football, did that even excellently, as evidenced by at least ten good shooting
Like Barcelona, Bayern went down and were beaten by a team of incredible defensive quality – but the most boring of football. It is shame this is rewarded. Having said that all credit to Drogba – a great player.