Bayern Barrage Revives Talk of Champions League Title Lars Baron/Getty Images Mario Gomez of Bayern Munich scoring the third of the team's seven goals in Munich on Tuesday. LONDON - Bayern Munich has awakened with devastating force after taking an unexpectedly extended winter hibernation. Less than a week ago, critics were calling for the team's coach, Jupp Heynckes, to take early retirement. Now they are saying that with the staging of the Champions League to be at Munich's Allianz Arena in May, there is no reason why Heynckes's team should not be there playing for a title. Fickle is the form of goal scorers, and fickle their critics. At the Allianz on Tuesday, Mario Gómez scored four times in 23 minutes against the Swiss champion, Basel, which neither he nor any other Bayern player scored against when they met in the first leg last month. With Arjen Robben scoring twice and Thomas Muller also on target, the Muncheners did not let up until they had routed poor Basel, 7-0. That punishing score came four days after Bayern thrashed Hoffenheim, 7-1, in Bundesliga. Suddenly, a team that had seemed unable to rouse its talents is running amok. And suddenly Heynckes, a prolific goal scorer in his own playing days, is the man with all the talents. "During training this week," he said after the victory Tuesday, "I sensed that the team was utterly determined to get through, totally focused. Today, we played top football from start to finish. We were very smart, very calm and very skillful. Over all, a perfect match. Basel, the conqueror of Manchester United this season and unbeaten away from home in the tournament until Tuesday, might still be wondering what force of nature hit it. Park Joo-ho, Basel's Korean defender, is probably still trying to figure out where Gómez went. Park is quite an experienced player, but nobody he has met in Asia or Europe has ever escaped him quite so obviously and so often as this. "I'll never be as good as Lionel Messi, and I'll never try to be," Gómez said. I don't see him as a peer. I see him as the ultimate footballer. Messi, of course, scored five in a Champions League match at Leverkusen last week. And Gómez, born of a Spanish father and a German mother, is totally correct. He cannot create as Messi creates. But what he can do, and do very effectively, is find the spaces, sense the lapses of concentration in opponents" minds, lurk, then strike out of shadows. His goals, bought by Munich from Stuttgart, are the finishing tools of a Bayern team that has extreme pace through the Frenchman Franck Ribéry on one wing and Robben on the other. If ever those two were totally healthy, there might not be a team in Europe that could stop Bayern. As ever, Robben said he was on antibiotics after feeling unwell, though his contribution, exquisitely demonstrated when he danced around the Swiss goalkeeper for the final goal of the night, was invaluable. What Gómez has is the ability to watch his wingers, to wait, to move like a ghost in the night, and to get on the end of their passes. Right foot, left foot or head, it all comes naturally to this poacher around the goal mouth. But ludicrous as it sounds, it is the rare trait to appear to disengage that allows the tall, athletic Gómez his chances. He is ever alert, even if he appears to have switched off. And while others may talk of the final in May, while fans and financiers may dream of what a Bayern victory there might do for Germany on the eve of the 2012 European Championships in Poland and Ukraine, you sense that Gómez is counting on one goal at a time. Longtime followers of Munich will tell you that they have seen the like before, in Gerd Müller, the Bomber of Bayern and the man who scored almost every time he laced up his playing shoes. Shorter-term fans see something more than a name check in Thomas Müller, the team's still-evolving player who on Tuesday weighed in with a goal of his own that reminded everyone of the timing and the clarity with which he scored goals as a teenager at the 2010 World Cup.