Publicly pursuing a striker who may not move for over a year is unlikely to improve the morale of those already at Bayern

So you're 15 points clear in the table, your centre-forward is banging them in for fun and you're off to play to Arsène "Taxi Driver" Wenger's Arsenal on Tuesday night. One option would be to simply count your good blessings. But no — as Rex Kramer would put it, that's just what they'd be expecting you to do. So why not cook up a transfer saga that will wreck relations with your closest league rivals and unsettle one, if not two, of your existing strikers — possibly for the next 16 months — in the process?

"We have no intention of negotiating with Borussia Dortmund over the transfer of Robert Lewandowski," said Bayern Munich's CEO Karl-Heinz Rummenigge to Bild on Sunday.

It sounded like a definitive denial of a rumour that he had likened to a "cockroach" only 10 days earlier. But on closer inspection this read more like a declaration of war. Rummenigge was dropping a heavy hint that the league leaders would press on with their pursuit of the Pole — who is under contract at the Westfalenstadion until 2014 — irrespective of Dortmund's stance. The idea is to force the champions hand into releasing him in the summer for a fee of €20m-30m, or take him for nothing a year later.

Even by Bayern's standards, this is a pretty brazen move, designed to take out a key piece of Jürgen Klopp's lego fortress and put it on top of Bayern's. This barely legal act of footballing blackmail would strengthen Bayern, for sure, and come with the added bonus of weakening Dortmund significantly.

In other words, it's classic alpha-male bullying by the Bavarians, tried and tested a million times since Calle Del'Haye, the saddest winger in the history of the Bundesliga, swapped a glittering career at Borussia Mönchengladbach for the drafty Olympiastadion bench in 1980. But why now? Couldn't they have waited at least until after the German FA Cup quarter-final next week, when Lewandowski will turn up with Dortmund? And why make this the main news story with the Champions League — and a shot at redemption for Munich — looming so large?

In a way, it's really the Italians' fault, as it so often is when it comes to German football.

Sky Italia, which broke the story of Pep Guardiola's appointment and forced Bayern to come clean much earlier than they wanted, also reported an agreement between the club and the forward two weeks ago. Information has since dripped out to the point that the German media have treated this as a fait accompli, and Dortmund's Hans-Joachim Watzke tried to force Bayern to show their intention on Friday. "They should put their cards on the table, they usually behave in a correct manner."

Munich would have been smarter to continue with their policy of deliberate ambiguity but Rummenigge probably could not help himself and took his knife out. The pain of missing out on Saturday's hat-trick hero Marco Reus (3-0 over Frankfurt) — he went to Dortmund and is threatening to become Germany's most impressive player at the current rate — is still keenly felt at Säbenerstrasse, and now it is payback time. Maybe.

The timing of this leak has been poor, no doubt, and it begs yet another question: why are Bayern going for Lewandowski right now, anyway? Mario Mandzukic, Bayern's first scorer with a fine over-head kick in the 2-0 win over Wolfsburg on Friday night, is on 15 goals in 19 games. Mario Gomez is on the bench, Claudio Pizarro a capable second back-up. You wonder if Bayern's need is worth the internal and external aggro, especially if you consider that an already fidgety Gomez has demanded that the club reveal their plans.

Contrary to earlier reports, the answer to his conundrum has nothing to do with Pep Guardiola. Bayern's incoming manager was seen dining at Käfer's, the club's preferred place for meetings. But he didn't present a fantasy football list — Neymar, Bale, Falcao — rather to the contrary.

Apparently he's told Uli Hoeness that he'll be happy with the squad that they will put together for him by the end of the summer. And there's another surprising element to this story, one that will probably lead to even more dressing-room jitters, at least in the strikers' corner: it is understood that a number of Bayern players have privately lobbied the bosses for Lewandowski.

Hoeness and Co must have felt that there's no time to waste in this regard and that it was necessary to agree terms now – who knows who'll come out of the woodwork if Dortmund's great run in the Champions League continues.

Gomez was not one of those pushing for the move, presumably, and it hasn't taken long for stories linking him with Atlético Madrid to emerge. And in Dortmund they know how to play this game as well. A long-forgotten connection to Toni Kroos is being rehashed as you read these lines, and there's a strategically-planted suggestion that Gomez might go the other way — with or without Lewandowski coming to Munich.

For neutrals this all provides a fantastic boon. The title race might be over, but the battle to win the post-season has just begun.

Talking points

• On the pitch Bayern and Dortmund were equally impressive, in different ways. Bayern strangled the life out of Wolfsburg with a master-class in sub-zero coolness. The hosts had one shot at goal. Mandzukic didn't celebrate his goal out of respect for the supporters at the Volkswagen-Stadion. He did spend a full two TWO years there. Arjen Robben got the second one very late, but it was less of goal and more of an excuse to moan about a lack of playing time. "I'm not happy, I don't see a reason why I'm not playing [more]," said the ever-popular Dutchman.

• A day later, Dortmund took Eintracht apart in the space of 10 minutes. Marco Reus despatched his first two goals in the carefree manner of a schoolboy kicking an empty Coke can in the playground. Julian Schieber's sending off after 30 minutes made Dortmund play even better, perversely.

"We didn't stand a chance today," lamented Frankfurt's coach Armin Veh. The Black and Yellows pressed and played at a level rarely seen in the league this season. "We didn't drop too deep, we didn't press too high, and we didn't give them any space at all," said Mats Hummels, beaming with pride. Schieber's suspension might lead to Klopp making the next step. Since Lewandowski is also banned for two more weeks, he will opt for a strikerless system.

• Schalke will claim that Klopp is only copying the tactical schemes of Jens Keller, of course. The Royal Blues played Jefferson Farfan as a false nine — Huntelaar and Marica were both unavailable — and came away with a point from Mainz. Michel Bastos was the star on the day with two goals that staved off a defeat that seemed inevitable. The mini-bounce has come at the right time: Schalke have regained a modicum of self-belief ahead of their trip to Galatasary on Wednesday.

• Bruno Labbadia can also sleep a little more easily. His VfB Stuttgart side managed to scrape a 1-0 win at Hoffenheim – dubbed Hopeless-heim by Bild – after five defeats in a row. "Tactical discipline helped us to this win," claimed Labbadia, not unreasonably. TSG's sporting director Andreas Müller, meanwhile, questioned the side's mentality. "I don't want to call this performance an insult but we all have to take a hard look at ourselves." A look at the top of Bundesliga 2 is also advisable: 16th-placed Hoffenheim seem destined to feature in the play-off against the third-placed team from the second tier come May.

Results: VfL Wolfsburg 0-2 Bayern Munich, Bayer Leverkusen 2-1 Augsburg, Werder Bremen 2-3 SC Freiburg, Mainz 05 2-2 Schalke 04, Hamburger SV 1-0 Borussia Mönchengladbach, Borussia Dortmund 3-0 Eintracht Frankfurt, Fortuna Düsseldorf 1-0 Greuther Fürth, 1. FC Nürnberg 2-2 Hannover 96, Hoffenheim 0-1 VfB Stuttgart

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