Lewandowski plotting Champions League success

Lewandowski is a serial champion: he has eight Bundesliga titles, three DFB Cup winners’ medals and another four Torjägerkanone gongs on his crowded mantlepiece.

But one big-eared footballing monument has so far eluded Lewandowski’s hoarding - the Champions League.

Maybe not for long, however.

"I still believe that one day we will play in the Champions League final and we will win it,” Lewandowski told The Guardian.

Watch: All of Robert Lewandowski's 19 Hinrunde goals

And since his arrival at the Allianz Arena in 2014, Lewandowski-powered Bayern sides have hardly been better placed to go all the way than the 2019/20 version.

The Poland captain has been in inspired form both at home and abroad this season.

Lewandowski has racked up a whopping 25 goals in just 23 Bundesliga appearances so far - a league record after 23 matchdays with the great Gerd Müller - averaging a goal every 82 minutes.

Meanwhile, his 10 Champions League efforts have come in just five matches and at an alarming rate of a goal every 43.7 minutes of football on the continental stage. Only Borussia Dortmund wonderboy Erling Haaland has matched Lewandowski’s UCL return, while the 19-year-old’s 10 strikes have come across two more games (seven) than his seasoned new rival.

Rested for the final group game against Chelsea’s London rivals Tottenham Hotspur, Lewandowski scored in all five of Bayern’s other matches in Group B as they made UCL history.

The reigning Bundesliga champions became just the fifth side ever to win all six of their group games, a feat only achieved previously by AC Milan in 1992/93, PSG in 1994/95, Spartak Moscow in 1995/96, Barcelona in 2002/03 and Real Madrid in 2011/12 and 2014/15. With a +19 goal difference, Bayern's 2019/20 group stage campaign was the most successful of the lot.

Bayern and Lewandowski’s best does tend to go hand-in-hand, so it will come as little surprise that his Champions League efforts this season have already equalled the greatest return of his career from back in 2012/13.

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A Dortmund player back then, Lewandowski famously hit four of his 10 goals that year in the 4-1 semi-final first-leg win over Real Madrid.

“If you score four goals against Real in a semi-final, it is something special,” he added to the British newspaper. “You never forget.”

You certainly don’t, and he won’t have forgotten the final that followed either.

Jürgen Klopp’s Dortmund eventually succumbed in the dying minutes to Lewandowski’s future employers in the final, and it is both the furthest the 31-year-old has ever gone in the competition and the last time Bayern won it.

Lewandowski has since reached two quarter-finals (one with BVB in 2013/14), as well as three semis as a Bayern player, but has come up short each time.

But with Lewy and Bayern raising the bar even higher this season, the Bundesliga’s record foreign scorer may not fall short this time around.

Just seven matches stand in his way and, first up, is Tuesday’s trip to London - a city where Lewandowski has four Champions League goals in five matches. A happy hunting ground for one of the world’s best in the mood for it: Chelsea, you have been warned.