Player Focus: Robert Lewandowski

“It’s the best feeling short of taking drugs… I’ve never taken drugs, by the way!” Jürgen Klopp joked earlier this week. BVB certainly is a trip alright. Once everyone started to come down from the high of watching Borussia Dortmund play Real Madrid on Wednesday night, there was, however, a lament that, once again come the summer, yet more elements of this thrilling team will leave. 

Arguably not since Louis van Gaal’s young Champions League-winning Ajax side of the mid-90s which featured Edwin van der Sar, the de Boer twins, Edgar Davids, Clarence Seedorf, the lightening quick Marc Overmars, Finidi George, ‘Europe’s answer to Ronaldo’: Patrick Kluivert, Jari Litmanen and Nwankwo Kanu, have football supporters around Europe prepared to mourn the prospective break up of a team. 

No more so was that apparent than in the first goal. Mario Götze, who it had emerged just the day before will be moving to rivals Bayern Munich in a €37m transfer on July 1, curled a wicked right-footed cross into the box where Robert Lewandowski, who may yet follow him to Bavaria, launched himself and, having got the better of Pepe, managed to get a touch to it with the sole of his boot to score. 

It was the beginning of an unforgettable night for Lewandowski and everyone associated with Dortmund, as he became the first player to score four goals at this late stage of the competition since the Real Madrid great Ferenc Puskas did so in the 1960 final to beat Eintracht Frankfurt 7-3 at Hampden Park.

Klopp could relate with Lewandowski to a certain extent as he watched the player celebrate his final goal - a penalty drilled straight down the middle - by holding up four fingers to the crowd. After all, he’d scored four times in a single game as a player too, though that, it must be said, was for Mainz against Rot-Weiß Erfurt on August 13, 1991 and it came in the 2.Bundesliga Süd. Hardly the same level, you might say. Well, at least “one goal was similar to Robert’s!” Klopp laughed. 

But which one? Klopp would probably like you to think either Lewandowski’s second or third, for both were exquisite examples of how to turn in a tight space.

So swift did he drag Marco Reus’ 50^th minute pass across his body, rolling with it and thereby opening himself up to prod a shot away to make it 2-1 that many, deprived of a replay for what felt like an eternity, thought he was offside. And as for the 3-1, the way he controlled that loose shot of Marius Schmelzer’s and performed the subtlest of roulettes to evade Pepe before smashing a shot into the roof of the net, well, that was just sublime. 

José Mourinho felt that his Real Madrid defenders could and should have done better. “When we know everything, absolutely everything about Lewandowski,” he said, “[when] we know everything about him, [when] we study him from every detail possible and we lose him [on] three goals – I’m not speaking about the penalty – when we know exactly what he does it’s of course very disappointing.

“The first goal we lost in easy possession and after that we lost [Lewandowski] when we know that they make crosses on the left side with the right foot on the second post where he comes. We know that all the time. His movement in the box for the bounce [of] second balls to attack the first or second post, we know everything about him. So of course the boy deserves credit for what he did but we gave him a big support for him to be Man of the Match.” 

Pepe, it’s true, did have a shocker. But it’s hard to agree completely with Mourinho’s assessment. Because elements of the goals they conceded were so hard to defend against: from the trajectory of Götze’s cross for the first goal to the speed of thought and execution Lewandowski showed for Dortmund’s second and third. He was just so clinical, as he has been throughout the Champions League this season, scoring 10 goals from 18 shots on target.  

Speaking of 10s, Lewandowski became only the sixth player ever to earn a 10 out of 10 from the notoriously hard-to-please L’Équipe on Thursday morning. He got another one from La Gazzetta dello Sport not to mention from WhoScored as well. His average rating over the competition as a whole rose to 7.86. Only Cristiano Ronaldo, a player he eclipsed last night, has higher over 10 or more Champions League games this season with 7.96, and while he lags two goals behind him in this particular competition’s scoring charts, he leads the way in the Bundesliga with 23 goals.

Providing he holds off Bayer Leverkusen’s Stefan Kießling in what remains of the campaign, Lewandowski, who has registered the third most shots in the Bundesliga [90] and the second most on target [47] with a conversion rate of 25.6%, will become the Torjägerkanone for the first time in his career in Germany. He has scored in each of his last 12 league appearances and were he to find the net in Dortmund’s final four matches he’d equal the record Bayern legend Gerd Müller established in the 1969-70 season when he scored in 16 games in a row, a truly remarkable feat.  

It’s worth reflecting here on just what a signing Lewandowski has proven to be for Dortmund. 

Bought for £3.9m back in 2010 from Lech Poznan, with whom he won the league, the cup, the super cup and the Golden Boot award by the age of 21, there were no shortage of tall tales following the Pole’s poker of how various clubs had once felt that they were close to getting him themselves; from Sam Allardyce apparently inviting him to a Blackburn game only for the ash cloud from a Icelandic volcano to scupper everything, as Lewandowski’s flight was cancelled to Steve Archibald claiming that he’d once offered him to Tottenham for “less than 5m”. Then there was that statement from Genoa in April 2010 denying reports they’d agreed a deal for him as well. Incredible. 

All that’s in the past, though, and what many are interested in now is his future. According to a report in Der Spiegel, a verbal agreement has been in place between the player and Bayern for some time. What’s to define is the transfer fee with the Bundesliga champions-elect said to be prepared to offer €25m. Dortmund are holding firm. Lewandowski is under contract until 2014 and it’s said that he was offered an extension after the Götze story broke, though he rejected it.  

After last night’s game, Dortmund president Hans-Joachim Watzke said: “It’s my explicit wish that Lewandowski will stay next season. We will even do without receiving a transfer fee for him – that doesn’t interest us in the slightest.” Klopp added his voice to that. “We don’t need more money,” he said. More to the point, do Bayern actually need Lewandowski too considering how well Mario Mandzukic has played this season and the fact they have Mario Gomez and Claudio Pizarro ‘in reserve’?  

A year ago, Lewandowski told Kicker: “I play for the champions, what do I need Bayern for?” Things, it seems, have changed. Dortmund have relinquished their hold on the Meisterschale. Then of course there’s the pull of Pep. “I can’t shorten myself by 15cm and start speaking Spanish,” Klopp said in reaction to Götze leaving. 

He shouldn’t feel like he has to. Because while Nuri Sahin left to play under Mourinho in 2011, then Shinji Kagawa to work with Sir Alex Ferguson in 2012, and now Götze and possibly Lewandowski to learn from Guardiola in 2013, one suspects that there’ll be plenty more, like Reus last summer for instance, who, certainly after this season if not the two that preceded it, would love to play for Klopp. 

Ensuring that they hold onto him, you feel, should be Dortmund’s No.1 priority, for self-deprecating though he is, he’s the real star attraction of Signal Iduna Park.