Pep Guardiola vs. Thomas Tuchel Will Be Key Bayern Munich vs. Dortmund Battle

Saturday's DFB-Pokal final between Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund will be a game of superlatives. The two dominating sides in German football over the last few years will face each other, and it'll be the fourth time in nine years that the Bavarians and the Black and Yellows go head to head for the cup.

It's the meeting of the best defence and the best attack, as Bayern conceded only 17 goals in the Bundesliga, a new league record, while Dortmund scored a club-record 82 times. 

It's also the meeting of the league's leading goalscorer Robert Lewandowski, who finished with 30 goals, and the runner-up, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, who managed 25.

Boil it down, however, and it's the meeting of the two premier coaches in German football. Both Pep Guardiola and Thomas Tuchel have built their teams following a clear philosophy and, in that, reached new heights.

There's a lot of mutual respect—admiration, even—between the Catalan and the Swabian. 

In a double interview with the German football association's official website (link in German), Tuchel said that one can learn everything about football watching Guardiola's Barcelona teams play, lauding his opponent on Saturday for proving that beautiful football can be successful.

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The Catalan, meanwhile, hailed Dortmund's head coach (via Goal.com's Dom Farrell): "Thomas lives football. He has this passion, this desire to want to know everything, to get better. He's 24 hours a day thinking about his team, the opponents, football generally. I like that about him."

With Guardiola leaving for Manchester City after Saturday's match, it could be the last meeting between him and Tuchel for a while. So far, the 42-year-old is winless against the man he called an inspiration before the last matchup in the league, per Spox.com (link in German).

In four matches against Bayern with Mainz and Dortmund, Tuchel has won just one point. And even in March's goalless draw, the Bavarians were much closer to winning than the Black and Yellows.

Tuchel's harshest defeat of the season came at the hands of Guardiola's Bayern, as a 5-1 drubbing in October showed the gulf in class between the two sides.

In that game, an almost simplistic game plan was enough for Bayern to shred Dortmund to pieces: Long passes over the top of the defence had the Black and Yellows scrambling, and a lack of communication between goalkeeper Roman Burki and a makeshift back line—Sokratis Papastathopoulos on the right and Lukasz Piszczek on the left played out of position—cost them time and time again.

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Dortmund have improved defensively over the course of the season, and it seems unlikely they'd unravel again. They better not, for one could argue Tuchel has more to lose than his opponent on the touchline.

Despite the fact that Bayern enter the game as overwhelming favourites, there's not much pressure left on Guardiola. The eulogies—some read more like obituaries—have already been written on the Catalan's tenure at the Allianz Arena, as Raphael Honigstein wrote for ESPN FC:

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Whether Guardiola secures a second double in three years or not doesn't really have much material bearing on the way he'll be regarded in Germany in years to come. His work at Bayern will remain "incomplete," as author Ronald Reng put it succinctly, successful on most levels bar the winning of the Champions League. 

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Tuchel, on the other hand, needs a crowning moment for his already-successful first year in charge of the Black and Yellows to replace the heartbreaking UEFA Europa League loss against Liverpool as this season's most poignant memory.

Combine the shocking collapse on Merseyside with three final defeats in a row, and Dortmund are already looking at being considered big-game bottlers. If the Black and Yellows don't come away with any silverware to show for their strong campaign, it will be forgotten before long.

Lars Pollmann is a Featured Columnist writing on Borussia Dortmund. He also writes for YellowWallPod.com. You can follow him on Twitter.