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Bayern's Robert Lewandowski: The Making of a Goal Machine - The New York Times

Bayern's Robert Lewandowski: The Making of a Goal Machine - The New York Times

Bayern's Robert Lewandowski: The Making of a Goal Machine - The New York Times
May 08, 2021 3 mins, 10 secs

Robert Lewandowski does not characterize it as thought.

In those moments when he has the ball at his feet and the goal in his sights, even after all these years, even when he can lay claim to being the most complete, most ruthless, most polished striker of his generation, he is not thinking.

There was a moment in his game for Bayern Munich against Borussia Dortmund in March when the ball fell to Lewandowski on the edge of the penalty area.

In that fraction of a second, the 32-year-old Lewandowski still noticed the following things: where Marwin Hitz, the Dortmund goalkeeper, was positioned on his line; when and how Hitz set himself to react to his shot; which of Dortmund’s defenders closed him down and which backed away; and the complex interplay of angles that accompanied their movements.

“I thought that next time, maybe it would be possible to score either between the legs or to go for the far post,” he said.

Lewandowski had scored twice: once from close range, once from the penalty spot.

It is a little surprising, then, that Lewandowski will confess to having a favorite type of goal.

And yet there is one type of goal that Lewandowski enjoys more than any other: a strike from long range, the type Müller describes dismissively as “a circus shot.” “If I can score from outside the box, that is extra,” Lewandowski said.

He has, after all, scored an awful lot of goals: 38 in two years for Znicz Pruszkow, his first senior club in his native Poland; 41 in two seasons for Lech Poznan; 103 in four years at Dortmund.

This season, which started not long after his 32nd birthday, he has scored goals with bludgeoning, devastating consistency.

After yet another hat trick as Bayern clinched a ninth straight league title on Saturday, he is one short of equaling Gerd Müller’s record of 40 goals scored in a single Bundesliga season, with two games to play.

The mark has stood untouched for four decades, but Lewandowski could have broken it weeks ago: he had scored 35 goals in his first 25 games when he picked up a knee injury in late March.

When Holger Broich looks at Lewandowski, he does not see what we see: the deftness of his touch, the surety of his finishing and the coolness of his head.

As Bayern’s head of science and fitness, Broich knows Lewandowski better than anyone.

He knows that Lewandowski can tolerate an extraordinary amount of stress and pain, as his almost spotless injury record demonstrates.

“Talent is a very broad term,” Broich said.

And Klopp was not exaggerating when he said that Lewandowski’s whole life, for more than a decade, had been designed to help him score as many goals as possible.

“Every morning, I ate cornflakes with milk,” Lewandowski said.

“If I have time to have dessert, I prefer to eat it an hour or so before lunch,” he said.

Over the years, Lewandowski has investigated anything and everything that might give him an edge.

Lewandowski professes not to miss any of it; the only thing he regrets, he said, is that soccer’s unrelenting schedule means he does not get to be spontaneous, to take a weekend off to go away with Ana and their two daughters.

He takes a keen interest in the work Broich and his sports science team do at Bayern: the performance diagnostics, the individualized training programs.

After all, as Broich said, “the rest has to be acquired.”.

Until, that is, Lewandowski noticed he had a chance to win.

That time, Lewandowski managed to reverse the process.

“That time, I chose to have fun,” he said.

At Bayern, Lewandowski has won everything there is to win.

“You can think: I have scored once, it’s enough,” he said

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