“It’s sunny and I just took a walk through the Retiro; This spring in Madrid’s Champions League semifinals is the life I imagined before I was born,” I wrote in a message. It rained in the afternoon, the wind picked up and Madrid, in Manchester, started losing 2-0 in the 11th minute. If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.
And yet, what a great game afterwards. What happiness to have come this far, and the way it has come, to have such a bad time and have such a good time. How difficult and fun it is to live the Real Madrid experience. A team that in Europe has loaded the barrel of the gun with a bullet and has been pulling the trigger in every tie, in every match, every ten minutes, sometimes on every ball played in defence. There is no truce between sadness and euphoria, everything is excessive in this universe, everything is already rock & roll and no one can promise that they will not get a sack at the Bernabéu, nor that they will get it (in the discount). Proof of the nonsense of the Champions League that Madrid is making with two franchise players aged 34 and 36 is that, after the defeat against City, the spirit of anti-Madridism is pessimistic, as if they had finally been inoculated with a kind of defeatism that It has no correspondence in the present result, but in the future.
There is no better example than what happened in two minutes on the left wing of Mendy and Vinicius, who gave City a great goal with a pass from the Frenchman to the Brazilian who saw a plane pass in front of him that took the ball from him, and ended the story with splendid header from Foden. Shortly after, a ball to the Brazilian, presumably asleep, ended in an anthological play in which, for a few meters, he ran more with the ball than the defenders who followed him. He made a monumental suit for Fernandinho and drove and drove, a cruel race for the Etihad and for Guardiola, who fell to his knees on the wing with Vinicius’ maneuver, until finishing in the way that Vinicius would never finish a similar move two years ago . It’s called age: people grow up. Some for good.
The best moments of Manchester City against Real Madrid in Diario AS
Madrid was under the scoreboard and the game the entire match, and under Guardiola’s drawing in the center of the field, sending Ancelotti’s disastrous initial approach to a walk, which put Kroos more as an object of sacrifice than as stoppers. A bath of those to turn off the television was promised in the 33rd minute. That was the minute chosen for Benzema to finish off a Mendy cross that was not a clear chance but one more Mendy cross, not even close to the goal. But the striker had asked for it, and the defender saw it. What Benzema did was first invent an opportunity where there was nothing, and then, already put, he invented the goal. At first, an unlikely shot, another one from an intractable player. He left a penalty for the end when he came from failing two in a row in the League, without a trace of sweat on his face, grabbing his beard in the shot that practically meant continuing in Europe or not. He went to the ball and scored it Panenka style, dragging the boot slowly, raising the ball enough to cause a heart attack, which must be the French Panenka because Zidane already executed it in a World Cup final with even more risk that Benzema.
The return at the Bernabéu does not invite anything, just as it did not when PSG went over Madrid in Paris. Although City, a great team in the best league in the world, is not the PSG of the sheikh’s collectible figures that collapsed with the first breath of Benzema. Now nobody knows where the bullet is in the endless barrel of Madrid’s gun in the Champions League, which pulled the trigger four times that were four goals, and comes back alive in a tournament that has a lot of the last dance of a wild and winning generation, very difficult to knock down and impossible to destroy.
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