Liverpool were utterly dominant but could not deliver the killer blow and allowed a defiant Atlético to come back from the dead Midway through this second leg, as the black shirts fell back into their carefully-stitched patterns, as Liverpool’s players struggled a little in their familiar home spaces, it was hard to avoid the feeling of a pair of hands reaching almost imperceptibly for the lapels, the clavicle, and finally the throat. This was a beautifully controlled strangulation, enacted in plain sight by Diego Simeone’s Atlético Madrid.But it was also a heist, a rearguard victory during which the Atlético goal seemed to be protected by some invisible membrane, sealed within a kind of high-strength footballing clingfilm. Related: Atlético Madrid and...
Only 10 months after Tottenham reached the European Cup final they hit the buffers in Leipzig – it looks like a long way backSo farewell then, Tottenham. Who knows when our paths will cross again? A fixture they embarked upon with a puncher’s chance and plenty of underdog spirit ended merely in crippling defeat and more questions. A broken team that under the joyless stewardship of José Mourinho has been broken still further, they looked here exactly what they are: the eighth‑best team in the Premier League, exhausted and error-prone, bad in defence and bad in attack, with no discernible long-term strategy and no identifiable short-term plan. Related: RB Leipzig leave Lloris squirming and hurry Mourinho's stale Spurs to the...
The Betis manager endured an emotional rollercoaster on the way to a sensational win that eases pressure on himThere’s something brilliantly bonkers about Betis, the football club that melodrama makes its own, and Sunday night that was them distilled into 90 minutes. Or maybe even in just the two seconds it took for manager Joan Francesc Ferrer – aka Rubi – to watch another rescue start to unfold, living out another life on the edge. Standing alongside the pitch five minutes before half time, he appealed for one penalty, appealed for another and only stopped because he then got something even better. Suddenly, the ball was tearing through the air, through his protests and into the net, noise engulfing everyone....
The future looks bright after Kai Havertz became the youngest Bundesliga player to reach 30 goals in win over FrankfurtAll things come to those who wait, and they certainly did for Bayer Leverkusen this weekend. They made it back into the top four. They did it by sweeping aside Eintracht Frankfurt who – after beating them 6-1 in the corresponding fixture last spring on their way to pipping Adi Hütter’s side to a Champions League spot – Peter Bosz’s side must have been desperately eager to face again here.Perhaps most importantly they did it with a fresh, vital young lineup that they have been waiting some time to unleash. At long last the teenage Brazilian Paulinho made his first Bundesliga...
Real Madrid, Barcelona, PSG, Juve and others have become short-termist as domestic success has bred complacencyJust wait for the knockout phase of the Champions League. That’s when the season really gets going, that’s when the real football begins. That’s when you get the festival that justifies the tedium of the group stage, the greatest football ever played, the glorious pay-off for the grotesque iniquities of the game’s financial structure.Ah. Related: Pep Guardiola expects 'incredibly aggressive' Manchester United in derby Atalanta’s story is romantic but this is the first season in which the last 16 all come from the richest five leagues Continue reading...