DUESSELDORF, Germany (AP) — Harry Kane and Bayern Munich are scoring a torrent of goals under new coach Vincent Kompany, but the England striker still thinks they're vulnerable.
Despite netting four times in Bayern's record-breaking 9-2 win over Dinamo Zagreb in the Champions League on Tuesday, Kane seemed more concerned with the two soft goals the team conceded just after half-time.
“We need to learn. We spoke about, already this season, continuing the performance from the first half. Each first half we've played has been really good this season. The second half has kind of dropped off," Kane told broadcaster DAZN after the game.
"We got away with it today because we were able to step up another gear but against the top opposition we could get punished for that, so we need to try and iron that out.”
Bayern has scored a scarcely believable 24 goals in five games in all competitions under Kompany — nine of them by Kane — but hasn’t faced top-class opposition yet.
That means it's still an open question whether Kompany's Bayern is a better team than the one that finished an underwhelming third in the Bundesliga last season.
Against Zagreb, there were echoes of how Bayern played under Kompany’s predecessors Julian Nagelsmann and Thomas Tuchel — lots of goals, but fragile under pressure.
Zagreb scored back-to-back goals in the 49th and 50th minutes to expose glaring gaps at the back and briefly cut the deficit to 3-2. The positioning of central defenders Dayot Upamecano and Kim Min-jae, who have been Bayern's first-choice partnership for a year, was a particular issue.
Bayern's next game is on Saturday at Werder Bremen, which beat Tuchel's team 1-0 in January. Bremen, ninth last season, will be Kompany's first opponent that finished in the top half of the table.
Despite Kompany's experience as a player, taking over at Bayern has been a big step up for a coach who was in charge of Burnley when that club was relegated from the English Premier League last season.
The former Belgium defender was far from Bayern's top choice, either. The club was stung by a very public failure to sign preferred targets like Bayer Leverkusen's Xabi Alonso or Germany's Nagelsmann — or even to persuade Tuchel to stay — before eventually landing on Kompany, who signed in May.
With a high-profile Bundesliga test coming on Sept. 28 against champion Leverkusen, Bayern doesn’t have long to iron out defensive problems.
Elsewhere in the league, two Champions League teams meet on Sunday as Stuttgart plays Borussia Dortmund. Leverkusen takes on Wolfsburg the same day and Leipzig visits promoted St. Pauli, which is without a league win since its coach Fabian Hürzeler left for Brighton in the close season.
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AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer
James Ellingworth, The Associated Press
