THIS WAS A SUBLIME, sweaty, sinew-scratching stalemate.
The two best sides left in the Champions League mirrored each other across 90 fabulously tense minutes and ultimately could not be separated. Each took turns to dominate swathes of the game, while the other used those periods to pierce the run of play with goals from long-range. First Vinicius, then Kevin De Bruyne.
Real Madrid tonight showed a quality and tactical versatility that proves their success in this competition is far from just the stuff of rare pedigree and black magic, while City exhibited a calm and resilience to show they are not encumbered by their own past blow-ups and status anxiety.
Pep didn’t over-think this one, but nor did he out-think Real Madrid.
Guardiola picked the same starting XI as he did for the high-point of City’s season thus far, the 4-1 win at home to Arsenal last month, but it was the same team for a totally different game. Where Arsenal pressed City in that game, Real Madrid started by doing anything but.
Arsenal left themselves exposed to great, anti-Pep larrups up-field to Erling Haaland and De Bruyne in that game, but Madrid refused to run the same risks and instead they crouched in front of their own box and surrendered the ball.
Madrid’s was an exquisite kind of passivity; it was as if Carlo Ancelotti had taken his lessons in proactivity from Sam Allardyce. City had more than three-quarters of possession in the first quarter of the game, and Madrid’s approach seemed on the verge of devolving to farce just after the half-hour mark, when Ruben Dias stood on the ball in the Madrid half and Benzema goaded him to attack further by abandoning his station entirely.
Dias eventually sauntered into the trap on which Benzema had turned his back. Vinicius was sprung to win the ball and launch a counter-attack, which ended with Eduardo Camavinga winning a corner by the endline.
Camavinga encapsulated the sides’ divergent approaches: Pep Guardiola has a full-back fold into midfield, whereas Ancelotti had a midfielder at left-back.
That fragment of the game actually sat snugly by another that came minutes later. Modric sprinted towards Camavinga at left-back, dragging Rodri out of midfield and towards him. Modric then insouciantly flicked the ball around the corner for Camavinga, who drove forward and rolled the ball in-field to Vinicius. From there, the night’s first moment of individual brilliance from range: Vinicius let the ball roll across him before booting it beyond Ederson with his right foot.
What a shattering moment it was for City, unrewarded for a period of dominance that ordinarily overwhelms their domestic opponents, now made to reckon once again with Madrid’s curious, irresistible alchemy in this competition.
But to ascribe Madrid’s success in this competition to some kind of unfathomable, unknowable magic is to do a disservice to their individual quality – Modric is a long-hailed genius; Camavinga and Vinicius are two of the best players in the world – and the tactical smarts of their coach.
Ancelotti knew his side wouldn’t survive another half of rope-a-dope against City so used the half-time break to retool his side and give them a jab. The change was a subtle one: Camavinga drifted into central midfield when Madrid had the ball, with either Vinicius or Modric standing out to his left and Toni Kroos dropping into a quarter-back role between the Madrid centre-halves.
The game instantly flowed in the other direction: now Madrid hogged the ball, and City hunkered down. To their credit, they weren’t carved open, and Madrid’s best chances came from a couple of long-range efforts and forlorn pleas for handballs. (They were too dubious even for Uefa’s perversion of the rule.)
So as Madrid threatened to overwhelm City, there followed another piece of eerie mirroring.
Madrid scored a screamer during City’s period of dominance, and so City scored a screamer during Madrid’s. Its genesis was Camavinga’s first mistake: he played a loose pass in-field onto which Rodri sharply pounced. Enter Kevin De Bruyne.
Gundogan laid the ball back to De Bruyne on the edge of the box, who hammered the ball into the bottom corner with a conviction that was brutal and beautiful all at once.
De Bruyne has always existed as a figure of necessarily alterity within Guardiola’s carefully fused machine, the one figure capable of bringing anger and personality on the few occasions when the Guardiola programme glitches and overrides. De Bruyne is the last City player who would click to send error report. He’ll improvise.
The game remained in its compelling balance to the end, with neither manager making a substitute until the 80th minute, presumably lost in the tense thrall of it all. Madrid had more of the ball and Ederson had to make a fine save from a stinging Tchouameni drive, but they walked a tightrope all the while: Antonio Rudiger pumped his fists when he got a flailing leg to Jack Grealish’s through ball for Haaland in the game’s final stages.
It finished 1-1, and the winner will be decided in Manchester next week.
Not only of this tie, but also of the competition itself.