De Ligt and Dier impress in FC Bayern’s most important game of the season. They don’t just amaze teammates and opponents with their similar looks.
Matthijs de Ligt had to laugh out loud when he was asked about Joshua Kimmich’s saying. A few minutes earlier he had joked about de Ligt and Eric Dier: “Eric and Matthijs get along quite well, the two half-siblings.”
That was definitely meant as high praise for FC Bayern’s new central defender duo. De Ligt happily accepted and joined in on the fun. There is a difference in how you can tell him and Dier apart, he revealed. After all, Dier plays with a long-sleeved jersey and he himself with short sleeves. Good to know. Because if you watch the two of them working together on the pitch, you usually have to look twice to see which of the two defensive specialists is currently in action.
Both have a very similar stature: De Ligt is 1.89 meters tall and weighs 89 kilograms, Dier is only two centimeters taller and two kilograms heavier. Both are muscular, have blonde hair and wear very similar short haircuts. They could actually be brothers: separated at birth and reunited at Bavaria. In any case, they now form Bayern’s double D defense. And very successfully.
De Ligt and Dier displace Upamecano and Kim
In the 3-0 win against Lazio, they pushed coach Thomas Tuchel’s former number one central defender pairing, Dayot Upamecano and Min-jae Kim, onto the bench. Dier and de Ligt harmonized almost perfectly, hardly allowing any chances to score and were therefore mainly responsible for the fact that their team remained without conceding a goal for the first time in seven games.
That wasn’t a big surprise for de Ligt. “It’s going well, we talk a lot together. We get along well. I think we showed a solid performance today too,” said the Dutchman to t-online when asked about the interaction with his defense partner. And stated: “We won the last four games we played.” They formed a functioning defensive duo most recently in the 2-1 win against Leipzig and before that in the two consecutive victories in Augsburg (3-2) and against Gladbach (3-1).
It is quite possible that Tuchel now bitterly regrets his decision to have separated the pair, who were already in good harmony at the time, in the subsequent direct championship duel in Leverkusen (0:3) and instead relied on Upamecano and Kim, even though both were not really fit. In any case, he experienced a debacle with his newly formed three-man chain, with Dier in the center. Not least because both Kim and Upamecano each made serious individual mistakes.
This is how de Ligt and Dier convince
De Ligt, who actually sees himself in the role of head of defense but was demoted to number four by Tuchel at that moment, had to watch the defensive drama from the bench. After struggling with several muscle injuries in the first half of the season, he has had a difficult time under Tuchel. He is not considered a big fan of the 24-year-old. Tuchel actually prefers defenders with speed who have their strength in building up. Both Kim (34.32 km/h) and Upamecano (35.02 km/h) are at least significantly faster than de Ligt (32.69 km/h) and Dier (31.77 km/h).
The English international, who came from Tottenham Hotspur in the winter and can also play in central midfield, is immediately by far Bayern’s best development player. With his precise long ball, which he played across half the field, he prepared, among other things, his friend Harry Kane’s 2-1 winning goal in stoppage time against Leipzig.