Real Madrid produce another sensational comeback to beat Man City and reach Champions League final
Another Champions League game for the ages, but this one so intimately influenced by the weight of history.
Real Madrid believed they could do the impossible. Manchester City feared the inevitable. That is only way to explain another incredible night in this competition. It’s the only way to read yet another spectacular Madrid comeback, and another cataclysmic Pep Guardiola collapse.
It all built up to this astonishing tie’s climax, infusing it with even more emotion. The faces at the end said so much, and more than the details.
Those details are that Carlo Ancelotti’s side came back from 1-0 down in the 90th minute to win 3-1, and make it 6-5 on aggregate, as well as reach a 17th Champions League final for the club. They will now be looking to ensure a record 13 becomes a remarkable 14, and stop Liverpool winning a seventh.
It also prevents a fourth all-English final, and prolongs Guardiola’s agony in this competition.
That was the thing about those details, though. The reality was something else.
To paraphrase a line from great literary fiction, for this was the greatest sporting drama, all Madrid Champions League comebacks are alike but each one is amazing in its own unique way.
You could say the same about Guardiola collapses. It all becomes incredibly predictable, but exquisitely enthralling because of that. It is only enriched by what went before.
That’s where the weight of history comes in. It isn’t replaying what we’ve seen before. It is adding to legend, to lore.
That is what the Champions League really is.
Time and again, this competition just delivers in terms of drama. It only deepens the question of why some of the people involved in this game – particularly Madrid president Florentino Perez – want to change this competition or even replace it.
There is nothing like it. It has everything.
Even a game like this, which had mostly been a classically tense European tie of the more vintage kind, just transformed into another modern epic; another explosion of colour.
So much of the intricate details from before – Guardiola’s gamble on an unfit Kyle Walker to subdue Vinicius Junior, the very concerted gear shifts – were all just long prelude, mere stage-setting for the real drama to come. Most of it was also almost divorced from everything that came before it, other than doing the job of building the emotion, allowing it all to simmer.
It wasn’t, ironically, Riyad Mahrez’s explosive finish that set the game. That was actually one more step in the build-up.
There were moments that followed that felt like they were going to become part of something bigger. Two were substitute Jack Grealish’s big misses.
These weren’t just chances squandered. They were moments that fired Madrid’s belief, that fostered that sense of destiny, at a period when it looked like they had run out of ideas and any imagination.
Other than Benzema and Luka Modric, though, this Madrid haven’t really been about creativity. They have been about will.
That is the only way to describe what happened in those frantic final few minutes. There was one piece of inspiration, though. That was Ancelotti’s brave introduction of Rodrygo for someone like Toni Kroos. That shouldn’t be forgotten amid all this. It was calculation amid the chaos. As against Chelsea, the Brazilian changed everything. His energy helped a team push themselves to the limit, while forcing City back. That almost sums up the tie-changing goal.
