One evening in April Herbert Hainer, the President of FC Bayern, stood in the basketball hall in Munich and beamed.

He had just watched his team win the fourth game of the Euroleague play-offs against FC Barcelona, ​​the most talented and expensive team in the competition.

And so Hainer said into the Magentasport microphone before the decisive fifth game: "We can only win."

Christopher Meltzer

Sports correspondent in Munich.

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Now, more than a month later, a crucial fifth game awaits FC Bayern again.

With one big difference: It's about the play-offs of the Bundesliga, not the Euroleague.

And because that changes the conditions, one can say on behalf of Herbert Hainer, who didn't speak into the microphone this time: His club can only lose.

Poorly defended

This Wednesday (8.30 p.m., MagentaSport) FC Bayern is playing in Bonn for a place in the German final series.

Where Alba Berlin, the defending champion, is waiting.

Actually, one would have expected Bayern to be there at the time.

They spend more money on their squad than the other clubs in the Bundesliga - and in the semi-finals they led 2-0 against Bonn, the first in the main round.

The result: match points in Munich.

There they lost both on Saturday (84:86) and on Monday (80:83).

They defended badly and rebounded even worse.

And so Bayern are no longer just playing for the final in Bonn, but also against the next major national disappointment.

There have actually been few disappointments in FC Bayern's basketball department since they hired Italian coach Andrea Trinchieri in the summer of 2020.

With his ideas and his passion, he led Munich into the play-offs of the Euroleague in his first season (and there immediately into the final fifth game against the big favorites Milan, who prevailed in the last few seconds).

No German club had done that before.

An even bigger disappointment?

This was followed by two finals in Germany against great rivals Alba Berlin: Trinchieri and his team won the cup – but not in the Bundesliga.

And even if the championship is the top priority for President Herbert Hainer, the disappointment was limited: because Paul Zipser, crowd favorite and regular player, was suddenly absent due to a brain tumor.

A moment in which sporting success was as unimportant, even at FC Bayern, as sporting success can sometimes be.

In his second season, in which Zipser later played again, Trinchieri and his team made it back into the top eight in Europe despite several outbreaks of Corona (even if Munich benefited most from the exclusion of the Russian clubs).

A triumph for the coach.

But in Germany there was the first big disappointment.

Bayern lost to Chemnitz in the quarter-finals of the cup – partly because an angry Trinchieri was expelled from the hall by the referees.

And now, even if it's still unlikely, an even bigger disappointment could follow: a semi-final defeat against Bonn in the Bundesliga.

On the evening in April, when Herbert Hainer was standing in the hall and beaming, Andrea Trinchieri also said a nice sentence: Now swim into the "mouth of the shark".

That's what he called the Palau Blaugrana in Barcelona, ​​where he finally lost the fifth game with his team.

It was a defeat he could afford.

In Bonn he doesn't have that luxury.

That is the fate of FC Bayern in the Bundesliga.

In a competition where he's the shark.