Uefa must make its showpiece event accessible as a lack of thought for wheelchair users led to a horror show in IstanbulAs a wheelchair user who attended the Champions League final in Istanbul last weekend, it was probably the worst experience I’ve ever had at a stadium. And I’ve been kettled outside Wembley with drunk fans pushing past my mum and knocking her over.When your team reach and win the Champions League final, you want to make memories from it. Unfortunately, Uefa created only nightmares. You have to question whether any thought was put in to considering the experience of disabled fans in the city during the planning process. Getting around Istanbul’s streets was difficult: dropped kerbs to help wheelchair...
Nobody wants to talk about repressive regime behind the club but Abu Dhabi pushes sport as source of soft structural powerWell, that’s that done. So. What now? Perhaps the funniest moment of the Champions League final at a distant, smoke-tainted Ataturk Stadium was the sight of the tuxedo-clad Hungarian classical musician Adam Gyorgy thundering his way through the tournament tune on a gleaming pitchside grand piano pre-kick-off, trying really hard to give this hammy faux-anthem some verve and twinkle.All the while, a hundred metres off to his left, 10,000 blue-shirted Manchester City fans doggedly booed every flourish, every attempt to inject a little feeling into the occasion. No, Adam. Please. It’s really not you. It’s just, well, it’s kind of...
Substitute gives Manchester City something they lacked and starts the move that led to Rodri’s winner against InterIt felt fitting, in the end, that Phil Foden should have a decisive hand. On a taught, sweaty, occasionally indigestible night at the Ataturk Olympic Stadium Manchester City finally turned the whole world a shade of sky blue, reaching the end point, the final high, of this extraordinary 15-year football-industrial project.City are champions of Europe. If this always seemed inevitable in the abstract, it still feels like moment of double-take, of pure sporting vertigo. A team playing in the same clothes as the one that seemed for so long the embodiment of gallows humour, familiar underachievement, a roll of the eyes in human...
Some tactical tweaks are not overthinking – they’re just thinking, and the Manchester City manager’s decisions paid offNot all tactical tweaks are the result of overthinking. Pep Guardiola did not simply pick the obvious starting XI. He did not pick the starting lineup that had propelled City through the Premier League run-in. He is criticised readily enough when he makes changes and City don’t win; this was an occasion when the change paid off. Guardiola made the necessary adjustment, and was rewarded with his third Champions League.Until mid-February City, by their own remarkable standards, had not had a particularly great season. There were questions – entirely reasonable questions for all the subsequent sneering – about what Erling Haaland did to...
Pep Guardiola’s side have the perfection of a finely executed military campaign, the perfection of wealth and strengthIt was at around 70 minutes, shortly after Toni Kroos had followed Luka Modric off the pitch, that the edges of the night began to sharpen a little and this Champions League semi-final took on a perfect clarity. Manchester City were going to win and Real Madrid were going to lose and no tweak or tactic, no switch or substitution, was going to change that fact.Real seemed to realise it too. Perhaps they were only 2-0 down but they were also bruised and broken, scarred and scared, tired of running into dead ends filled with blue shirts. Vinícius Junior had long since stopped...