For maybe 15 minutes towards the start, the UEFA Champions League quarterfinal between Bayern Munich and Barcelona looked like an actual football match. 

Bayern began with a scary level of intensity and took only three minutes to find a goal.

On the edge of the box, Thomas Muller feigned a shot and tapped it to Robert Lewandowski who tapped it back. And the fake shot froze Barca long enough for Muller to smash it home. There was another in the seventh minute when David Alaba accidentally scored an own goal defending against a Jordi Alba cross.

At 1-1 and only eight minutes in, the quality was staggering. Unlike the usual two-leg Champions League quarterfinals, these ties are all knockouts, and both sides were playing as if this was the last 10 minutes of extra time, not the moments following kick off. Luis Suarez, Lewa, Leon Goretzka, and Lionel Messi took turns testing the goalkeepers.

In the 21st minute, however, Serge Gnabry made a short pass to Ivan Perisic, who drilled the ball past goalkeeper Marc-Andre her Stegen to make it 2-1. Looking ahead to what happened in the remaining 69 minutes, it wasn't the goal that broke Barcelona but how it started.

Gnabry effortlessly robbed the ball off Sergi Roberto before giving it to Perisic. The euphemisms to describe how severe Bayern Munich have been this season are many. In this particular game against Barcelona in the empty Estadio da Luz, they were a team of Terminator robots, and this simple action was the moment they learned how frail their human opponents were.

Bayern scored again in the 27th: Goretzka flicked the ball on, and Gnabry timed his run perfectly, charged through Clement Lenglet, and blasted it into the bottom left corner to make it 3-1.

Lenglet found himself on the wrong side of Bayern's fourth goal, too as Muller got a step ahead of him to receive a low cross from Lewandowski that he tapped in to make it 4-1.

The already truncated clash should have been shortened further as the game was over at the half time. In the first 45 minutes, Barcelona was exposed as a fraud. The silky-smooth passing of the opening passage showed that, when things are good, manager Quique Setien's side can ping-pong passes to each other all day, and that Messi still has that golden touch.

Things for Barcelona aren't always good; they don't always get to play against La Liga minnows such as Celta Vigo and Eibar. Sometimes they have to play elite sides like Bayern Munich, and when that happens, they have no idea what to do.

As the Bayern goals progressed, they got easier. The dummy shot into the one-two between Lewa and Muller in the first five minutes turned into Gnabry simply running straight through the defense.

Suarez got Barcelona's only actual goal of the night and, at 4-2, Bayern may have thought a fightback was on, so Joshua Kimmich made it 5-2 just to make sure; Alphonso Davies ran around Samedo as if he wasn't there and found Kimmich open in the box, even though there were five Barcelona players around him.

Why were they there? What were they doing? It's impossible to overstate how bad Barcelona were in this game. Limp, lifeless, slow, stupid. If it was later revealed this was Bayern Munich against Messi and 10 men who had never even seen a football before, it would make more sense.

Lewa finally got his – a point-blank header - in the 82nd minute to make it 6-2, and it still wasn't over. To rub salt in the already gaping wound, late substitute Philippe Coutinho finished the game with a brace. The ex-Liverpool man was traded to Barcelona in the 2018/19 season for a reported 142 million pounds and barely made an impact. Considered an expensive flop, he was sent out on loan to Bayern Munich one season later.

In the 85th minute, Lewandowski took the ball from Messi and passed it to Coutinho. He basically jogged into the Barcelona box and sliced it past ter Stegen, who made no effort to stop it. Three minutes later, he did it again; Corentin Tolisso received a cross from Thiago and headed it to the feet of Coutinho. The Brazilian had time to control it with his right and bang it in with his left while he was a step away from ter Stegen and being marked by Samedo and Lenglet. He totally humiliated the team that didn't want him.

8-2 flatters the La Liga side. Barcelona is an organization that has been coasting on its reputation and, only now, when it is far too late, have they been found out. Barcelona are an embarrassment, Bayern are a juggernaut, and whoever they face next should be very afraid.