The match ends and De Bruyne, that Belgian boy who looks like a grandson of Elizabeth II, poses with the trophy for the MVP of the night. A fair award, and not only for the goal, won with a very close shot that neutralized Oblak, but for everything he did. A different player, brilliant, active, intense. A player to imagine and also to arrive. He and Foden, who had just joined, managed to open the only crack in Atlético’s thick defense and that was how the game was resolved. Guardiola had just made three changes, Atlético had not yet caught the measure of the re-entrants and suffered a mismatch through which the pass from Foden to De Bruyne slipped in.
If De Bruyne was the best, Foden was next. The appearance of him improved the local attack, which until then was lost a lot in riotous actions by Sterling, too determined to fabricate a penalty rather than a play of real danger. It was, as expected, a tight game, with Atlético waiting and City on top, pressing energetically and then looking for a way to get into the thicket. Atleti almost got the plan. That single moment failed him, that Reinildo that goes wrong, that Felipe that closes worse and that connection between two great players. That’s where that goal slipped, which tilts the tie in favor of City.
A shame, because Atleti’s plan began and ended in their obsession with keeping a clean sheet. He defended with two lines of five, with Griezmann and João Félix, each on a band, sacrificed at the ends of the first of the two lines. It can be said that except on that one occasion, Atleti annulled City, but in exchange for not giving Ederson a scare. The 1-0, conceded by that single crack, leaves a sensation of a task only half completed. The second leg will be brave. Atlético has strikers to shake up the City area in eight days at the Metropolitano, but it will be at the cost of offering City spaces that they were denied yesterday.
#Foden #Bruyne #fabricated #slit