Exactly two years ago, during the month of March, Bayern Munich faced a serious problem. Its biggest star, Robert Lewandowski, was injured in a match with the Polish national team and was sentenced to a month’s absence from the courts. Everyone who was lied to by the club, did not know exactly how to eat the strange and strange situation. For, Lewandowski, the player of the year in the world at the time, who was a kind of iron man and immune to injuries, did not put his teammates in such a sensitive situation, certainly not in the decisive stages of the season.
Who was called to fill the huge void of the top scorer, was Eric Maxim Shopo-Moting. The Cameroonian striker and quiet substitute scored against the former PSG, but on that snowy evening in Munich, Bayern lost 3:2 to Kylian Mbappe and his team and in the end failed to change the evil of the division and was eliminated in the quarter-finals of the Champions League. And here, 24 months have passed and once again Schoof-Mutting is the starting striker for the Bavarians against the Parisians. This time the hero of the play is in a completely different position and his team has a better result than the first game (Bayern won 0:1 in Paris in the round of 16). Not only does Bayern no longer have the absence of Lewandowski (who moved to Barcelona this summer) in the basket of excuses, but Schoofo-Motting comes to the match in excellent shape, in fact with the best momentum of his career.
Last weekend, the striker, who will be 34 this month, scored against Stuttgart his tenth goal of the season in the Bundesliga, and in total he has 16 goals in 24 appearances in all competitions this season. This is more than any other Bavarian player this season. seamlessly stepped into the big shoes left by Lewandowski. After all, the formidable Polish striker left behind a legacy of over 40 goals on average in each of his eight seasons at the Allianz Arena. But surprisingly, there is one statistic that the Cameroonian surpasses the Pole: when he’s on the pitch, Shopo Moting conquers Or cooks every 75 minutes in his three seasons in Munich, which is a minute better than Lewandowski.According to this category, the African is actually Bayern’s most effective player in the last 20 years.
It should be remembered that Shopo-Moting was not the first option of Julian Nagelsmann at the beginning of the season, when it became clear that the team would not bring a successor to Lewandowski and had to calculate a new route. Furthermore, the Cameroonian was injured and missed the opening games of the Bundesliga. Nagelsmann tried a new formation – 4-2-2-2 with Sadio Mane, Serge Gnabry and Thomas Müller alternating as the front two. The results did not justify the experiment and the Bavarians won only four of the first nine games in the league. The pressure on Nagelsmann to return to the originals took its toll and he sent Shopo-Motting into the fray and received Shopo-Nadovsky.
In the 10th round against Freiburg, Shopo-Moting already entered the lineup for the first time on the goal striker standard: he scored and scored on the way to a crushing 0:5. The Cameroonian, who often seems a bit clumsy and a kind of anti-hero, scored in five of the six consecutive league victories, added goals in the Champions League and the Cup, with only the World Cup break stopping the Bavarian machine and its “new” star. “He wasn’t always able to complete training in my first year and a half at Bayern,” he said Neglesman About Shopo-Moting, “But since overcoming the injury, he is at the highest level physically. Shopo-Moting is a great player and a much-loved figure in the dressing room.”
Shopo-Moting spent the first part of his career as the head of the Foxes. The player who grew up in Hamburg, made his breakthrough in the Mainz uniform more than a decade ago. After that he also starred in the English Stoke and Schalke, with whom he played in the Champions League. Even the biggest lovers of the actor did not think that his career would go where it did. The second part of the career was the pioneer on the tail standard for the lions. Thomas Tuchel, who coached him in Mainz, decided to bring the player, who turned 30 in the summer of 2018, to PSG, no less and no more. He served as a substitute in the team of Edinson Cavani, Neymar and Kylian Mbappe and even scored the memorable goal against Atalanta in the Champions quarter-finals in 2020.
A month after the loss to Bayern Munich in the champions final, he joined the German champion as a first substitute for Lewandowski. And for the past two years, he sat quietly on the bench and waited for his opportunity, which, as mentioned, arrived last October from the front door. “I knew that one day I would be able to reach the highest levels,” said Shupo-Motting in an interview he gave this year in Germany, “Many people ask why a certain player reached a high-quality team. Over time, the quality you have determines whether you will get the chance at a big club. There are those who get the The opportunity is straight and others have to work. If you work hard, success will come. My parents always taught me to be patient.”
At the beginning of this month, Shopo Moting received the final reward for his hard work this season with the signing of a new contract until 2024 at Bayern. The sports director Hasan Salimichic He was flattered in the official announcement: “We are happy about the extension of Shopo-Moting’s contract. Eric is a master of the ball and succeeded in filling Lewandowski’s place as a central striker.” None of this necessarily means that the Bavarians will stop looking for a striker next summer, with Harry Kane’s name continuing to feature in the rumor sections of the German media. But until then, Schoof Motting has a tremendous opportunity to prove that he is not a Band-Aid, but a medical potion, even if it has a short expiration date, that can work miracles and lead Bayern to the European Championship.
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— FC Bayern Munich (@FCBayernEN) March 5, 2023