The coach is excited to be close to retaining the trophy he lifted with the Bavarians last season and dedicated Saturday’s win over Dortmund to the Brazilian
Pep Guardiola dedicated Bayern Munich’s 1-0 away win over Borussia Dortmund to Brazil international centre-back Dante.
Robert Lewandowski scored the only goal against his former club at Signal Iduna Park, ensuring that the Bavarians kept their 10-point lead over Wolfsburg at the top in Germany.
The Spaniard, however, reserved praise for the South American, who has not featured regularly of late.
“I would like to congratulate my players and dedicate this victory to Dante,” he said. “He hasn’t played often recently but he played very well today.
“He is an incredibly important player for us. I’d like 1,000 Dantes in my team.”
With just seven games to go until the end of the campaign, a proud Guardiola has done the maths and knows the Allianz Arena club cannot be caught if they win four of the remaining league games.
“People often don’t know how hard it is to play against teams like Dortmund or Bayer Leverkusen,” the former Barcelona head coach told Sky. “But every match is incredibly hard as we saw today.
“I would actually like to have played differently than we played today. But I also have to pay attention to who is available.
“It is not easy to win here – Bayern have done that only twice since 2009. Now we have to win four games before the end of the season to become German champions, and we want to do that.”
Bayern are still in with a chance of claiming their second treble in three seasons as they are in the DFB-Pokal semi-finals and Champions League last eight.