Serge Gnabry and Robert Lewandowski leave lightweight Chelsea searching for a miracle

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Chelsea's support still sing the songs about 2012, and one presumes that somewhere in the Bayern Munich psyche aches a little at the hubris that was their presumption of winning the Champions League final on home soil eight years ago, although nothing in this game lasts forever.

This was Chelsea’s first meeting – save a Super Cup - with Bayern since that monumental Champions League final of 2012 and they finished it needing something like the miracle that occurred in the Allianz Arena almost eight years ago to stay in this competition. In reality the odds are even greater given the limitations of the Chelsea team that Frank Lampard has had to piece together this season and a Bayern side that returned to London for their second demolition job of the campaign.

Serge Gnabry scored twice, after his four against Tottenham Hotspur in October, and there was another to add to the pile of goals that Robert Lewandowski has accumulated this season, his 43rd for club and country. It was Chelsea’s heaviest-ever home defeat in European competition against a Bayern team that belongs in a very different level: a great side honed from a blend of youth and experience over recent years. Much like the vintage sides in which Lampard himself once played.

To paraphrase that infamous Bayern slogan before the 2012 final, this was Chelsea’s stadium, and very much Bayern’s night – one in which they dominated possession and put the tie so far out of sight that the second leg feels like an obligation rather than a game. Of course, there is always room for a comeback in the knockout part of this competition but Lampard was talking in the aftermath in terms of his side showing pride in Munich in three weeks’ time, and beyond that the challenge of qualifying again for next season.

From Bayern’s 19-year-old left-back Alphonso Davies, a Canada international who was born in a refugee camp in Ghana after his family fled Liberia, there was a sizzling performance. Down the flanks at Stamford Bridge, he was travelling at the kind of pace that felt like it might contravene speed restrictions in most other parts of West London. It was electrifying, and the hopeless attempts by opponents in blue to fling themselves in his path only served to remind Chelsea that there are many different levels at which this game is played and this was not theirs.

“I learned about the players,” Lampard said later, and he did not sound like he was particularly joyful about any of it. There was a late red card for Marcos Alonso whose arm was thrust into the face of Lewandowski, a decision that referee Clement Turpin reached having checked the video assistant referee review monitors first. Lampard was unimpressed at Jorginho earning an early booking for challenging the French referee that means the midfielder will also be unavailable in the second leg.

“It was a harsh lesson,” Lampard said, “a reality for the players of the level we want to go to.” Not many of them will make it was the message and clearly some of them should already have gone, including Olivier Giroud, who started this game, as well as Alonso. Having picked the same team that beat Spurs at the weekend, Lampard brought on Pedro and Willian later from the bench – two more whose time at Stamford Bridge has been and gone. Lampard said as much later when he talked about those who had been at the kind of level required earlier in their careers.

From the final of 2012 in which Lampard captained Chelsea, Manuel Neuer, Jerome Boateng and Thomas Muller all started this game too, a long-serving successful core of the type Chelsea once had and would like again. There have been moments when Lampard’s young players this season have given great hope to the club but they ran up against their limits on this night, ceding more than 60 per cent possession over the game and playing most of it with five at the back.

They look like one of the annual round of 16 lightweights, for whom the rest of this competition seems destined to be played without. Bayern looked very much the team who have gone 11 games unbeaten in all competitions under the caretaker management of Hans-Dieter Flick. In October they beat Spurs 7-2 in North London and this was their seventh win out of seven Champions League games in the current campaign. Chelsea never felt like they were in the tie.

Bayern sized up the home team in the first half with Thiago Alcantara inevitably making the whole operation tick. It was his long ball through to Lewandowski that the great Polish goalscorer took early with his left foot, stopped by the chest of Willy Caballero. From Muller a strange header which he allowed to strike the side of his head as he spun away from goal, the harder of the options open to him, and although the ball eluded Caballero, it struck the bar.

The two Gnabry goals owed much to the sharpness of thought that he shares with Lewandowski, on both occasions the pair of them one step ahead of the rest of the pack. The first was created by Thiago in the middle of the pitch and went from Gnabry to Lewandowski and back again via a cut-back from the left side for Gnabry to score.

The second was another thrilling exchange in midfield after Lewandowski won the original header, received the ball back, and his through ball was brushed past Caballero by Gnabry. This was football of a very different quality to anything that Giroud or Barkley were capable of conjuring up between them. On came the substitutes Tammy Abraham, Willian and then Pedro, once part of a Barcelona team that set the standard at this level and now one of the ranks of the disenchanted at Chelsea.

Lewandowski’s goal was most memorable for the run of Davies down the left wing when the Canada international was past two tackles in the blink of an eye to cross for his team-mate. Alonso was sent off and Chelsea were left with the uncomfortable reminder that they must do this all again in Munich on March 10.