Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester City and Bayern Munich are the favourites to progress from a set of fascinating tiesAre Real Madrid any good? They are 10 points clear in La Liga but the sense is that Spanish football is in retreat. They were outplayed for two and a half hours of the last-16 tie against Paris Saint-Germain and for all the brilliance of Karim Benzema and Luka Modric in those final minutes, it’s also true that the turnaround was as much the result of another PSG collapse as anything they did. Continue reading...
Cristiano Ronaldo had no shots on target and Ralf Rangnick’s changes made no sense against a ruthless Atlético MadridDeep into the 94th minute at Old Trafford, Manchester United swarmed forward for one last attack. As the famous red shirts massed ominously in the penalty area, the Stretford End rose as one, shouted as one, dreamed in vivid noise and colour of a classic United comeback. Meanwhile, surging forward with the ball at his feet, the messenger at the gates of glory, was Nemanja Matic.Well, Matic carried on running. Slowed. Slowed a little more. Took a look up. Panicked. Remembered that he still had a football at his feet. Spotted Marcus Rashford on the right wing: the simplest and least threatening...
European Cup has become an obsession that deepens with every year but collapse at the Bernabéu showed their fragility“Don’t you sit in our chair.” It was just a moment in the middle of the madness, another picture of a wild, epic night with all its drama and its silliness too, but David Alaba had summed it up somehow. As the Santiago Bernabéu lost its collective mind on Wednesday and Karim Benzema slipped to his knees, fists clenched, the Austrian picked up a white plastic chair and raised it triumphantly to the sky. Iconic and, when he chose to caption it, symbolic too: you don’t just unseat Real Madrid.“We’re the Kings of Europe!” the banner had declared before the game; by...
Having built a lead through their striker’s brilliance, Paris Saint-Germain crumble under Real Madrid’s pressureThere was once a dream that was Paris. It lasted for just over an hour. At which point, enter the old world – and enter Karim Benzema, who had the night of his storied footballing life in this Champions League last-16 second leg.Under the lights of the Bernabéu Paris Saint-Germain produced one of the more extraordinary collapses of elite football’s modern history, a collapse made all the more abject by the divine well of talent in this Paris team, the gerrymandering certainties of Messi-dom, of that divine front three, bought to secure the crown of European club football in this, our year of Qatar 2022. Continue...
Cristiano Ronaldo cut an isolated figure for Manchester United against a team he has hurt countless times in the pastThere was a moment just before half-time at the Wanda Metropolitano when Cristiano Ronaldo stood on the penalty spot, delivered a shrug of the shoulders, pulled a face and raised a finger: one, just one. None of his Manchester United teammates were really looking his way and even if they had been, there was little they could do about it, and so he walked slowly back out of the area, shaking his head, alone. It was a journey he would embark upon often.All the way to the end, in fact, when he was the first player off, throwing back his arm...