Out on their own with five Champions League titles in a row, the French club are sweeping all before them but remain a microcosm of the broader conversation around female sport
Perhaps the moment we all realised that Lyon were going to win the Champions League once again came about seven minutes before half-time, as Lucy Bronze stepped up to take a throw-in. As Bronze waited for the referee’s signal, she started absent-mindedly spinning the ball on the end of her finger, like one of the Harlem Globetrotters to which this all-conquering, lavishly-funded Lyon team is so frequently compared.
It was, in a strange way, the perfect emblem of a final that offered only the illusion of closeness. Though Wolfsburg certainly had their moments during their 3-1 defeat to Lyon in San Sebastián on Sunday night, there always seemed to be a basic, elemental difference between them: a combination of quality and extra gears, of poise and big-game experience, of which team needs to scrap and sweat for every last inch, and which has the chutzpah to start doing basketball tricks in the first half of a Champions League final.
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