Robert Lewandowski admits he’s yet to fully digest the magnitude of his historic final-day strike against Augsburg, which broke the Bundesliga record for most goals in a single season.
Gerd Muller’s record is broken
Lewandowski was denied a hatful of clear-cut scoring chances by Augsburg goalkeeper Gikiewicz, and looked set to miss out on the best mark, which he had equaled on the penultimate weekend.
But the 32-year-old was not to be denied. In the final minute – and with the last meaningful kick of the game – after his Polish countryman spilled a shot from substitute Leroy Sane, Bayern’s peerless No.9 pounced to stick away his 41st Bundesliga goal of the campaign.
“I have to say I never dreamt about breaking this record, to score more than 40 goals because I thought that it’s impossible,” Lewandowski told bundesliga.com after rewriting the history books in Bayern’s swashbuckling 5-2 win, played out in front of 250 spectators at the Allianz Arena.
“If you only have 34 games and I played 29 games – so that’s why I still don’t believe what I did. But I think of this whole game, I scored in the last seconds – not only the last minute. I was trying three, four, five times to score, but I couldn’t. And the last situation came, and I scored the goal. That is something special, something historic. I still don’t believe it, but maybe tomorrow, maybe even one or two weeks later, I’ll understand what I did.”
In Lewandowski’s defense, it’s a lot to take in.
Over the course of the campaign, the Poland international registered five braces, four hat-tricks and one four-goal blitz. He only failed to score in four of the 29 matches he featured in, and never went more than one without finding the net. His most prolific burst fell between Match Days 21 to 34 when he tallied 17 goals in 10 appearances, either side of a four-match absence due to a knee ligament injury. He also sat out the Matchday 6 win over Cologne. When Müller set the 40-goal record in 1971/72, he played in all 34 of Bayern’s league fixtures.